Tracy Fahey is an Irish writer. She has been shortlisted for Best Collection at the British Fantasy Awards (2017 and 2022), for the Leicester Short Story Prize (2021) and for the London Independent Short Story Prize (2024). Her work deals principally with reimagined folklore and female Gothic. Fahey's short fiction has appeared in more than 40 Irish, UK, US and Australian anthologies and has been reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement. Her writing is supported by residencies in Ireland, Greece and Finland and funded by Grants Under The Arts and an Individual Arts Bursary. She was awarded Saari Fellow status for 2023 by the Kone Foundation to research a new collection which examines the relationship between older women, folklore and power.
Her most recent book, the feminist folklore novella They Shut Me Up (PS Publishing, 2023) was described by Interzone magazine as ‘a gargantuan ice-breaking ship of a book. Like Angela Carter before her, Tracy Fahey has done something fundamentally new and necessary with old and misunderstood stories.'
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PROLOGUE
This is a story of voices. Lost ones. Found ones. Revoiced ones.
Everyone has their own voice; but some are whispers. Others are loud and strident. The more they’re used, the stronger they get. Those voices are fine.
The quiet ones are a worry. They hide and mumble, stammer and apologise.
Never say you’re sorry for having a voice.
We are all a story. We are all the narrators of our own lives. How can you tell your tale if you haven’t discovered your voice? How can you speak your truth if you don’t let your voice rise above a whisper?
We all deserve to have a voice. And if you don’t feel worthy of it, use it anyway. You owe it to all those who went before you; those whose words were swallowed up by years of exhaustion, sickness, hard work, childbearing. Even those who raised their voices, well, they got talked over; their narratives rewritten by century after century of patriarchal revoicing.
But they haven’t gone. All those words, lives, voices. Listen carefully and you will hear them. Those voices were drowned out, but they did not disappear. All are still spiralling round us. They whisper in the trickle of streams, they sing in the throats of birds, they breathe in tickles of soft breezes.
And sometimes, if we’re receptive, they speak directly to us.
So what are you waiting for?
You deserve your voice.
You deserve to be heard.
Tonight I feel different. Strange.
I touch my cheek in the darkness; feel the familiar contours of my face. The small, indelible lines over my eyebrows, the silk of my eyelids, the bloom of down on my jawline. Fingers flutter, soft against my neck. Downwards.
There. My heart beats a flurry of drumrolls.
Right there, in the soft, boned V at the base of my throat. Pliant but firm, two little mounds curve up against my fingers.
My breath, suspended. Pulse flutters, a moth in darkness.
The worst end to the worst day.
© 2023 Tracy Fahey