This is a short story written in response to the photo prompt from Sue Vincent last Thursday.

I hadn’t seen the house in seventy years. A lifetime. I stared at the ravages of time: stone walls still standing, but roof collapsed and weeds brought by the wind finding a home in pockets of the structure. For a brief moment, I saw it as it had been when I was a little girl. Tidy, neat, with its red slate roof intact…flowers growing in a plot by the front door, vegetables in a garden to the side, smoke wafting from the chimney, and three red-haired children running in and out the door. The sound of my Mam’s voice coming from within, “Mind your sisters, Siobhan. Don’t let them go down by the river.”

There was magic in those days, when Da came home from the fields and we all joined hands in…