the village
Chapter 1: The Arrival
It didn’t start with a headline, or a broadcast, or any one person’s name. It started with a whisper—one of those half-remembered comments passed between tired volunteers and night shift workers, half in jest, half in fear.
“They just disappear, you know. One by one.”
At first, I brushed it off. Dublin is a city of stories, and people go missing all the time—some out of desperation, others chasing freedom. But when Josephine stopped coming by in 2016, and again in 2017, and her phone went silent soon after, the whisper turned into something else. A question I couldn’t shake.
Had she left? Or had she been pulled into something bigger than either of us could imagine?
Josephine had been everything to me once. Friend, companion, tether to a past that made sense. After the fire in Bray, after the long, cold months we spent patching ourselves back together, she was the last constant. Until she wasn’t.
I kept sending her care packages, every December. Food, socks, letters with my neat handwriting and hopeful words. I told myself she was just busy. Overwhelmed. Maybe sick of it all.
But then I heard about Wicklow.
Not the postcard town. Not the tidy tourist lanes with their painted shopfronts and cheerful coffee shops. No, the Wicklow behind the Gaol. The one you had to know to find. The one where people paid in cash and lived without surnames.
They called it a village. Not out of size, but secrecy.
It was said to exist just past the shadows of the Wicklow Gaol, tucked in an overgrown lot where caravans leaned into hedges and tarpaulin roofs flapped against the wind. Laundry lines crisscrossed the air like warnings. Old burner phones were passed around like rosary beads. And if you were lucky—or desperate enough—you might be allowed in.
That’s when the questions turned to search. If Josephine wasn’t answering, maybe she was there. Maybe she’d joined those who’d vanished. Not in death, but by choice.
And if that was true, what did that mean for the rest of us?
The Village wasn’t a myth. It wasn’t a dream. It was a symptom. A quiet rebellion. A hidden community carved out by those the world forgot—or pushed too far.
And whether or not she was in it, her silence made more sense in its shadow than anywhere else.
Chapter 2: Among the Forgotten
Josephine arrived under cloud. Not the kind that brings rain, but the kind that settles into the bones. A cold unease, laced with the smell of moss and fuel. The bus dropped her off near the gaol, and for a moment, she hesitated—half-thinking she’d turn back. But Wicklow was quieter now. Less eyes. More space.
She’d been given instructions weeks earlier. Written on a torn envelope. “Bus to Wicklow. Walk past the Gaol. Take the gravel path behind the last iron gate. Wait by the wooden fence.” No name. No contact. Just a place and a hope.
Someone was waiting.
A woman in a blue fleece jacket, holding a half-lit cigarette and a phone with no screen. She didn’t speak, just nodded and started walking. Josephine followed.
They moved through trees, past rusted machinery and makeshift fences of pallets and wire. And then suddenly, it opened—a hidden clearing, ringed by caravans, vans, and crooked sheds patched with whatever had been at hand. This was the Village.
There was no welcome speech. No leader. Just the quiet rhythm of people surviving—some fixing clothes, others sharing tins of beans or checking solar chargers. It was life stripped bare.
Josephine was shown a caravan. Not hers, but borrowed. She’d be on rotation until she earned her own space. Her name wouldn’t be used. From that moment, she was just “Jo.”
Everything was on trust, but everything was watched. The overseers were rarely seen, but felt—guiding without words. You followed the flow, or you were asked to leave.
There were rules, unspoken but enforced:
No photos.
No phones beyond their burner network.
No questions about the outside.
And just like that, Josephine faded from the world that had demanded too much. Her club fees. Her welfare reviews. The social workers who asked more than they gave.
In the Village, she was free. But freedom came with a price: anonymity. Silence. And a past she could never speak of again.
Somewhere beyond the trees, the world continued. But here, under tarps and whispers, Josephine found something almost like peace.
Almost.