April 17, 2009 – 12:04 pm
At 7:30 in Massimo’s (William St. West) on Friday 24th of April The Atlantis Collective are throwing a party. Yes we want you! There will be free wine and food, live music, selected readings from the book, followed by Dick Coombes’ excellent blend of 60s and 70s gotta-get-up soul and gotta-get-down funk.
And, of course, we [...]
Henry fills his mouth with urine and looks across at Jasper. He swirls it slowly around in his cheeks, with a look on his face that conveys the impression that he’s sampling a particularly complex burgundy.
“It’s like pear juice.”
“That’s exactly what it’s like.”
They sit facing each other, nodding agreement. Wind whistles wickedly around the timber [...]
Gary could kiss her right there and blame it all on that something in a summer’s day. They’d been drinking by the lake: Eamon and Susie, and Gary and Jenny. They usually did their Sunday drinking inside in town, chasing the weekend into early houses and parties where someone says ‘I’ve to work in the [...]
It was only after what happened happened and I gave up the drink that I realised I was fraida heights. A few hours ago – last night or this morning or whatever – I was looking up at the roof of Paddy Fahy’s Pub and membering how I skipped across the black slates on that [...]
The soul is an old graveyard. Heaped with the bones of a thousand dead lives, a thousand dead names, a thousand dead dreams… joy and suffering…the memory of a thousand women…brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers… They are all buried out there, nameless and forgotten, un-grieved and untended. It is a landscape that has a memory [...]
A lot of people that I started off liking, I have grown to hate. It has gone the other way too – I have grown to like some that I hated initially. But not this fella; I hated him from the first time I clapped eyes on him and that’s the way it stayed. People [...]
Fintan Brady sits groomed and formal in the conservative clothes of his profession, waiting for the patient charts. He glances at the heading on the top sheet of his colleague’s pile of papers, “47% of those who disclosed sexual violence to researchers had never told anyone else before.” Mary Flaherty, the new partner, is training [...]
My father was a difficult man. He only every spoke to me in proverbs. When Mum died I was still young enough to think that boycotting her funeral could bring her back. But my father came into my bedroom and pinned me up by the neck, his voice booming,
‘Son. You have to go to other [...]
No more, please, no more. I am wrung dry of tears, as though I were a rag twisted in the hands of mighty Samson himself. They have spilled upon this cold stone floor all night, this floor that I pace my agony across this floor that was to be his inheritance. I look out of [...]
Bastards, the lot of them.’ Paul pelts the Wexford People down on the spilt beer and heads to the bar for more pints. His round face, topped by tight black curls, is usually jolly but now it wears a dark scowl. Vinnie sees the headlines. Unlike his pal he has a thin, pinched look. He [...]
