Celtic Music Album -

The note rose, raw and slightly sharp, like a seabird startled from a cliff. She let it hang in the damp air. Then, from outside, an answer.

Tonight, a storm was building over Galway Bay. She poured the last of the whiskey into a chipped mug and picked up her fiddle—a 1923 instrument from Sligo, its varnish worn thin by her grandmother's chin.

Fin.

The hare bolted. But the tune remained—imprinted on the rain, tangled in the thorns of a blackthorn bush. Saoirse played along, her bow dancing across the strings like a possessed thing. For hours she chased the ghost-melody through the Burren, sliding on wet rock, losing her boot in a bog hole, laughing like a madwoman. The tune changed as she ran: now a lament, now a reel, now a single, sustained note that sounded like a dying star.

It sold out in six hours.

She almost deleted it.

Three weeks. Three weeks of walking the gray, fissured hills where the earth looked like the knuckles of an old god. Three weeks of listening to the wind thread through the grykes, the deep cracks in the limestone. She had recorded nothing. celtic music album

Saoirse Cullen