Alannah O’Connell, Age Twelve

My first morning in Boston smells of coal smoke and salt from the harbour.

I press my forehead to the cool glass of my bedroom window and look down at the street below. There isn’t a patch of green anywhere, only grey pavement and rows of buildings crowded close together. A delivery truck rumbles down the road, cutting off a car. The horn blares so suddenly I flinch.

It’s nothing like home.

In Ireland our houses sat together on my grandda’s land, tucked between green fields and stone walls where most mornings the loudest sound was the wind off the sea or my cousins shouting across the yard.