Cauilleach-oidhche Geal

She had known, she thought as she laid down in fresh, cool sheets, that her troublesome sleep would worsen before it improved as she adjusted to the strangeness of a new apartment. The night was taut with uncomfortable tension; the house, long accustomed to emptiness, creaked and groaned in adjustment to unfamiliar possessions and an unfamiliar being.

Her third night here. No more promising of sleep than the first two, disrupted far too early by the sun streaming through uncurtained windows. The moonlight tonight was much the same as that unwelcome sunlight.

She sighed into the semi-darkness and resigned herself to wakefulness for the moment. The moonlit tile was cool to the touch of her soles as she padded down the hall. The house seemed to sigh in reply to her.

A rustle that sounded like feathers somewhere behind her spun her around just in time to catch a subtle shift in the shadows cast across her bedroom floor, but she saw no source, nothing but statue-still shadows and silvery, cold moonglow. She turned back toward the front of the house and shivered.

Perhaps a bath would ease her to sleep; she filled the antique claw-foot tub with water, steam rising from the surface and perfuming the spacious bathroom with heavy lavender and warm vanilla. A short row of tealights filled the dim room with a luxurious incandescence.

She sank slowly into the bathwater. Scalding hot to the touch, the water evaporated all thought from her weary mind. As she adjusted to the heat, her eyelids grew heavy, the top sinking to meet the bottom, and her chin dropped to her chest.

A sharp tap on the window startled her awake. How long? she wondered. The bath water was no longer scalding hot, and steam no longer rose from the glassy surface, but neither was it quite tepid yet. She swirled the water around her calves with prune-wrinkled hands, remembering an excerpt from an anatomy course text that described the adaptive gripping purpose of fingers and feet swelling with water. The tap on the window came again, insistent. She startled, having forgotten that the sound had woken her.

She pulled the drain for the bath and stood, wrapping in a fluffy cream cotton towel. She pulled the cord to retract the bamboo slat blinds and opened the window. There was no apparent source for the tapping. Maybe a tree branch blown against the glass with the wind, she thought dubiously. Pulling the glass shut, she saw that there were no trees near enough to the window to be blown into it.

She shrugged, returned to her satin-brushed sheets, and, revelling in their feel against her naked skin, climbed into bed. As she drifted back to sleep, she thought she heard the feathery rustle from earlier, but it was not enough to keep the ship of wakefulness ashore.

The next morning, she rose with the sun that streamed into her bedroom, refracting off the bright white walls and filling her eyelids with peachy light before they opened. She yawned and stretched, walking to the window that looked into her alley. She flung the window open and let in the cool morning air. A lump of matted fur and bones caught her eye, just at the corner of the windoow ledge.

Ew! she thought. Some stray cat leaving me presents, I suppose. She used a tissue to push the lump off of the window ledge and into the dumpster below the second-storey window. She went about her morning and forgot the incident entirely--or nearly so, until later, when she passed the downstairs tenant on her way out.

The woman was a distraught-looking mother of three or four children ages toddler to adolescent, seen and heard running around the woman in comical madness as she attempted to greet the girl in the hall. “Hi there, you’re in C?”

“I am,” the girl replied. “Just moved in.”

“Would you mind keeping an eye out for my cat? She got out and she’s not normally and outdoor cat. Real distinct, long-haired princess-looking Persian thing with blue eyes. Can’t tell a human from a hand out, so she’ll come right to you.” A diapered toddler cried at the woman’s feet and held arms upstretched; he was received by his mama and slung easily to a pair of wide, comfortable hips.

The girl nodded, handing the child a dropped teddy bear. “I might have seen a trophy she left by my window,” she told the woman. She described the boney furry mass she had seen.

“Eh, no, that sounds like an owl pellet,” the woman stated, absentmindedly cleaning her son’s grubby, rosy cheeks. “There’s a barn owl that hangs around. Might be her. They don’t usually hang around crowded areas like this, but she’s been here a while now.”

She had never seen an owl in person, and the idea gave her a slight shiver of fear. “How do you know it’s a she?”

“Oh, I dunno. I just was told a story about an old crone barn owl. Granny was Irish, from the old country, and had all sorts of stories like that. That’s the one I remember best. The Cauilleach-oidhche geal. Supposed to mean someone’s gonna die, like banshees, but I like to think this one is just my Granny saying hi. She was an old crone of a woman when she went, afterall.”

She chuckled and said her farewells, promising to watch for the woman’s cat.

It was late when she returned home for the evening, the sunset long since faded past twilight and into proper night, cool and crisp, but with a soft edge on the breeze that hinted at warm summer nights soon to come.

While there may have been a gentle breeze playing with late night pedestrians on the street, inside, the air was still and stagnant yet full to bursting with the anxious energy of an as-yet unraged storm.

She cleaned. She hung drapes. She paced through the halls of the house, into one room, glancing at the boxes, mentally running through what was in each--then to another room, a furtive look around, and back to the kitchen.

A glass of water. A deep breath. Palms and fingers rake across the face, coming to rest on the neck. Another deep breath.

The house was truly empty for the first time since her arrival; the other tenants were not home tonight, neither the one with all the children nor the neighbor she only knew vis-a-vis their vehicle parked on the street.

She was alone. Truly alone. Solitude had never bothered her, but she had never lived on her own, without any roommates or family. It was time, she had decided, and she had found a place that felt empty and in need of filling with her. And so she had set out to do so. And yet, here, in this moment, was the first time she had truly felt the sense of being alone.

Another deep breath in. And out. Her back thudded gently against the refrigerator, her knees gave out beneath her, and she slid to the floor. Her breath caught as she exhaled, the muscles in her chest contracting tightly until all of the air had squeezed from her lungs...and yet still she did not breathe in. She was startled to find salty tears streaming down her cheeks. She gasped, the air dragging into her lungs as though it were reluctant to do so.

As her chest clenched tight again, forcing every gasp of air from her, there was a furious rap-tap-tap-tap! on the window, and a flurry of feathers and talons against the glass!

She lept to her feet and ran to the window and wrenched it open, suddenly face to face with the dish-bowed, heart-shaped pale face of a barn owl. Beetle black eyes bore momentarily into hers before the owl rushed past her and into the kitchen. She screamed. It flew into the wall and landed with a soft flump in the small space between the ceiling and the cupboards.

“Who are you?! What are you doing in here?!” she yelled at the owl. The owl scrambled to its feet and peered over the edge and down at her.

Who are you? What are you doing here? it seemed to ask. She imagined a ragged crone’s steely growl.

“Ma’am, if I knew that, do you think I’d have an owl in my kitchen?” She laughed at herself. “I’m talking to an owl. I’ve lost it.” She pushed the window open as wide as it would go and stepped away from it, gesturing broadly at the owl.

Maybe it’s time you found it, my dear. The owl hopped to the edge, flutttered down to the counter top, and hooted at her.

She move further back. “Found what? My mind? It’s a hard thing to find once you’ve lost it.” Her mind flashed to the story her neighbor had told her. “Am I going to die?” She asked the owl.

The owl screeched in what was unmistakably laughter. No, silly child. Not tonight.

“Cauilleach-oidhche geal?”

The owl scratched at the counter and puffed up its feathers, peering at her. It is the most important journey you can undertake, finding yourself and learning to be with her, to love the light and dark of who you are.

The owl flapped its wings wide and lept to the air, taking up most of the kitchen as it swooped to the open window and perched on the ledge. She had to step back quickly to avoid being cuffed across the cheek. It spun its head around nearly 360 degrees, staring deep into her eyes and clicking its beak pointedly. Learn to love your shadows like you love your light, it told her before leaping into the darkness.

She ran to the window and stared after the apparition, gone as quickly as it had arrived. She stood there, half-way hanging out the window, in wonder, for several minutes. When finally the chill of night moved her back inside, a sense of calm and wellbeing washed over her. She walked resolutely to her bedroom, snapped shut the newly-bought curtains, and crawled into bed. Her eyes were closed before her head hit the pillow, and nothing stirred her from sleep until the alarm rang the next morning.

Scrambling to her feet and down the hall, she was pleasantly surprised to find that daylight had broken some time ago and she had slept through it. She grinned and danced to the kitchen to start coffee. Briefly, she wondered if she’d dreamed of the encounter with the owl until--

There, on the floor in the middle of the kitchen, set as though intentionally, bisecting one of the square tiles, was a buff and brown, striped and speckled feather. She froze, the details of the encounter with Cauilleach-oidhche geal flooding her mind again.

When she remembered to breathe once more, she knealt, picked up the feather, and held it to her cheek. She carried the feather to her room and laid it next to her lamp. There would be no more sleepless nights for many years to come.