Úna Ní Dhálaigh (Human, Celtic Union, her daughter)

The ceiling was dark and then it was not.

Úna had been told bed and had gone, and had been told the shutter would stay as it was, a hand's width, and it had, and the moon had come in the gap and put a white bar across the ceiling that did not move, which was the moon. She knew the moon. She had been looking at the white bar for long enough to be nearly asleep when the ceiling round it began to come up.

Warmer than the moon's white, and no bar to it: it lay over the whole ceiling at once, and it moved, slowly, the way the light off the river moves on the underside of the bridge in the afternoon, except that the river was below the house and this was coming from the top field, and the top field had no water in it. It breathed. Up, and down, and up.

Somebody was humming. A long way off, with the mouth closed, one note, and when the note went up the ceiling went up with it.

She thought about getting up. The window was right there and the shutter was a hand open and she could have put her eye to it. She had been asked not to, not in words, in the way the shutter had been left and the way her mother had said bed, and she lay and looked at the ceiling instead, and the ceiling was enough. It was the best thing she had seen on a ceiling. She was sorry when it started to go.

It went the way it came, slowly, down into the white bar, and the white bar was the moon, and the moon was ordinary.

Then the front door, and her mother's step, and words at the door said quietly to nobody, which was the words her mother said, and the step went to the bed and did not come to Úna's room, which meant Úna was supposed to be asleep.

She was, soon.