Free The Fire Opal by Regina McBride

I was soaked in my homemade dress.
    They stood still when they saw me in my despondency. Somehow they seemed even more appalled than usual.
    I swept past them and went inside, where I found Ishleen awake.
    “Mam,” I pleaded to the inert, wistful figure whose eyes looked hopelessly past me into some unknown vision. “What do I do?”
    The hope that had gripped me now for so long regarding the dress was utterly gone, and I wondered about my own sanity.
    I sat down before the fire, shivering in the soaked dress, and cried. Ishleen touched my shoulder. When I did not stop crying, she went and opened the door. Miraculously, the sun had come out and was lighting the world, a clear day in high summer. I got up and looked out. The sea where my father and brothers were casting their net was as calm as new milk.
    I took the dress off and hung it outside on the line to dry in the clement air. As it stirred there on a faint breeze, the poorly crafted garment looked sad and deflated, the bodice caved in, the shoulders and arms slumping unevenly. Silk, I realized, should not get wet like that. The sheen was gone, the cloth pocked and wrinkled. What had I thought I could create? And even if I had createdsomething close to the majestic dress at Muldoon’s, what, then, would that have meant? I felt as though I had fallen from a great height.
    I went back in and lay down in the box bed, leaving my chores and responsibilities on hold, and fell into a heavy sleep.
    Later in the day when I awakened, the dress had gone missing from the line. I did not go in search of it, and in some perverse way was relieved by its disappearance.
    “Probably the wind has blown it away,” I said to Ishleen, though it had been a still day with only mild breezes.
    A week later, Tom Cavan’s mother, short and bent and wearing a flowered scarf on her head, came to our door.
    “I’m taking a pony and trap into Dungarven tomorrow, Maeve, to buy fabric to make new curtains. Wouldn’t you like to be coming along?”
    I was surprised by the kindness of the gesture. Mrs. Cavan had never offered to help me with Mam or Ishleen. I knew she had always resented me for having told her husband about Tom’s transgressions, and I knew she felt I was responsible for his having been sent away from Ard Macha. But maybe, having heard that my spirits were low, she’d softened to me.
    “Thank you, Mrs. Cavan,” I said. “I would like to come.”
    When I told Da about it later, he said, “I’ve a fewemergency coins stashed away. Why don’t you take them and buy yourself some small trinket?”
    I hugged him. He’d been worried about how sad I’d been lately.
    The shop in Dungarven reminded me of Muldoon’s Fine Imports. Both were situated on rough-and-tumble wharves, where rope, tackle, leather and farm supplies were sold. The shop was, as Muldoon’s had been, an anomaly encased in its own mist.
    A bell rang when we opened the door. The shop matron looked up at us in acknowledgment, but was busy speaking to two other customers dressed in lavish clothes, a mother and a daughter.
    Mrs. Cavan went directly to some little glass bottles while I veered away toward a mirror, which I approached nervously. We had no mirrors at Ard Macha; in the past few years I had seen only the faint smear of my reflection at home in the copper pot, so it was always distorted. The self looking out from the other side was different from the reflection I’d seen years before at Muldoon’s. My cheekbones were more prominent, my features were no longer soft but defined, and all over my nose and cheeks there was a light dusting of small freckles. There was something grave about my expression.
    Gradually, the longer I looked, the less I thought of the reflection as being me. This image, I thought, gave the impression of someone formidable and complicated. I felt envious of this other in the mirror, as if she lived inthe atmosphere of glimmering lights, an entirely different, more powerful and