‘The Miller’s Daughters’ by Sarah Kelly

after Sarah Howe

Some say they flew, swan-like, to their deaths. Necks stretched delicately, nightgowns
filled with billowing wind. A slender stirring of water.
Others say a thud was heard, sickening, as they fell onto the spinning mill wheel below,
and that the river rolled red all the way to Rockchapel.
Either way. Before the miller’s daughters’ first screams, the miller’s wife
hastened to the playroom to stop his fist, high.
He wrenched her from the room, flung her into the hall and locked the door
with a skeleton key. And that is where they found her,

knees gouged into the faded carpet, fixed, one fist broken and bloodied, the other clutching
a frayed rag doll, head bent in curse or prayer,
for all the good it did. The miller, having done what he had set out to do, followed. He leaped
as if from a flagrant room, a flimsy kind of finale. The miller’s wife,
they say, never spoke again. Her life devoured by her daughters’ death. For sorrow is
consummate. She should have died too. Then at least she would
be loosened. Sometimes, in winter, sitting by the window to watch the flow of the river, she
willed them back – come, come – humming with her crystals and her

swinging pendulum, a deranged necromancer, till defeated, she withdrew so far, there was
nothing left but the limp torso of the rag doll, arms stretching for
something imperceptible. I know all this, not because my mother told me, or that my
mother’s mother told her, but because I see them rise
up from the river every night, whirling through mist, till they seep through the stone
walls like sleep walkers. Sisters linked by brisk intent.
Bloodless eyes fixed, they float past me up the stairs to the third floor. The playroom is long
gone, of course. The miller’s wife,

I’ve heard tell, lugged its contents out into the yard one spring, and howled as a rocking
horse, three china dolls, a spinning top and two skipping
ropes went up in a fermentation of fire. Time passed, as it is wont to do, and, tired of
their feathery fingers groping, I sold the old mill some years back to a thick-
tongued developer, who disembowelled every bedroom, stairway and lavatory, salvaging
nothing but the crusty, limestone husk, lichen splotched with bruises
against a rising grey. You might think my story ends here, but those who know the paths of
ghosts, know, too, the compulsion to return.
August last. A tenant rents a one-bed on the third floor – it is almost as if she knows.
Clenching the railed balcony with curled toes, she swears
she sees hair swelling yellow in the rushing river below. A simple surge.
Past. Present.

From issue #5: autumn/winter 2017

About the Author
Sarah Kelly is an emerging writer who lives and works in Cork. This is her first publication.