Rock Paper Scissors

The narrative focuses again on Robin, who that day made one of her monthly trips to the nearby village Hollowgrove for food. Robin’s mother periodically escaped to the two-room cottage where Robin lives whenever Robin’s father abused her. As an adult, Robin returned to live there as a hermit with an unnamed companion, whom she feeds baby food.

In describing the structure, Feeney writes:

The cottage had been built by hand more than two hundred years ago, for the priest who looked after the chapel when it was still used for its original purpose. Some of the thick white stone walls have crumbled in places, to reveal dark granite bricks. The fingerprints of the man who made them are still visible, two centuries later, and it always cheers Robin up to think that nobody disappears completely. We all leave some part of ourselves behind (77).

Sitting by her fireplace, smoking a pipe, Robin can see the lights in the chapel: “When she glances out of the window again, and sees that the chapel is in complete darkness, she thinks that the visitors’ good luck might be about to change” (79).