The Bog Girl

‘Once it had been determined that the girl was not a recent murder victim, the policemen relaxed. The chief asked Cillian a single question: “You're going to keep her, then?”'

What?! But then again after reading Caitlin Doughty's ‘From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death' I recall that there are other views on corpses.


‘Gillian Eddowis was on a party line with her three sisters. She tucked the phone under her chin and took the ruby kettle off the range, opening a window to shoo the blue steam free. In the living room, roars of studio laughter erupted from the television; Cillian and the Bog Girl were watching a sitcom about a Canadian trailer park. Their long silences unnerved her; surely they weren't getting into trouble, ten feet away from her? She had never had cause to discipline her son. She wouldn't know where to begin. He was so kind, so intelligent, so unusual, so sensitive—such an outlier in the Eddowis family that his aunts had paid him the modern compliment of assuming that he was gay.'

‘ “I am hers, and she is mine,” he announced. “I have dedicated myself to learning everything about her.”
A sighing spasm of envy moved down the popular girls' table—what boy alive would say this about them? A miracle: nobody mocked Cillian Eddowis. They were all starving to be loved like this.'