She is dreaming of her father again, but, in lieu of his head, atop his neck is the enormous black eye. He sits with Colca, her son, on his knee, whose head is also an eye, but Colca’s body is that of a grown man’s, and he is naked and sprawling, careless in his movements. They are sitting on a chair by an open door, so she knows the world of her dream is set somewhere in the past, for they no longer have any chairs in this house.

Her father, Balffe, eighteen years ago, after the Boyne flooded and the harvest was ruined, was called down to Dublin to deliver specialised horseshoes to an eccentric chevalier who had found himself in possession of a stallion with two cloven hooves. Gone for two Sundays, on the third he stood in the doorway, blocking its light with his form, holding with both hands a small, foul-smelling item all wrapped up. He laid it on the table and called his family together to see it. They gathered around and he unwrapped the bundle, exposing an enormous black eye.

It was like shone glass imbedded in a perfect circle of grey flesh, seemingly melded together by some master smith, and it was the size of two fists. Disembodied, the eye seemed to stare out at them all in calm contemplation, its lower half still bundled amongst its cloths like a swaddled baby.

‘The famine has been averted,’ her father declared. ‘Sea monsters, about five hundred of them, though I only hazard, for no lonely creation can count that many at a single go, caught themselves along the banks of that river they call the Liffey, and the Dubliners, a skinny people, had them within the day parcelled into thousands of small portions. Each monster was like the length of Nobber, and mountainous as well, but they were swarmed over by Dubliners like ants, because that is how city folk move about their own streets, in great numbers, with great hurry, but also in great uniformity.

‘There was so much blood that a red mist arose over the whole town, through which none could see the other. That same night there was a fine drizzle, and I left my lodgings to drink ale as I was lonely without my family about me. I was with a lamp to see about me, but there fell on me many great salty liquids. My lamp grew so dim I went back into my lodgings. I was blind and very greatly saturated about the skin, even under my eyelids, and once inside, I saw that my lamp had been covered in great streaks of blood, as had I, and I realised that the night time sky had rained blood.