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 cabin, celebrating its triumph over electricity, probing for further weakness.

“Never drank pear juice.”

“Me neither.”

The door rattles on its hinges, and both turn towards the disturbance. Flame hurls shadows into the slipstream of their collective gaze, gifting an almost ethereal quality to their surroundings.

“Just the wind.”

“That’s all.”

Jasper reaches onto the floor, grabs a half-full bottle of beer and takes a hearty swig. He holds the bottle at arms length, subjecting it to intense scrutiny, struggling to focus on the label in the poor light. Read More »

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 morning’ and everyone leaves. But today, with the sun out, they took Gary’s green Corolla out to a quiet spot between the lake and forest, which wasn’t a forest really, just some trees planted there together by the council.

They sat out at noon in a line, Susie beside Eamon, Gary beside Jenny. They uncovered their skin like new ground for the hot sun to shine on.  They drank gold cans from the blue square of a freezer box. The car ticked, its metal doors were open like wings to let the radio play in wrinkles on the still water. Read More »

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 filled with the dull slap-sound of shovels flattening down the barrows. A shuddering of the loins caws over the hillocks like a spook of crows, sorrow like a rend in the sky. Confusion is storm, pain is lightning, anger is a tremor, love is an orange sunset, wisdom is a peaceful yellow… Understanding and ignorance - a coin tossed into the air.

…The soul is an old graveyard…

I came into this small room, through a door over there. Right here, in the middle, was a table with a page and a typewriter on it. At the right side of the table, stuck, point first into the floor, was a large hunting knife. There was a window open over there. Stuck to it was one of those classic orange vacancy signs blinking on and off. I knew that knife was down there. I reached down to grip it. That fucking knife… Cuts me…every time… I stamped my hand onto the page and the sign went out and when it came back on it said No-Vacancy. Read More »

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 called him Ten-To-Two-Blue because he walked like Charlie Chaplin and he was always pissed off. I lived with him for two years - he was living with his sister, who I met at a bus stop where I proposed to her. We got married the next day and I moved in.

Within a week of moving in, I saved his life. We had gone for a walk by the harbour. He fell in off the top end where the fishing boats moored and fishermen cast away ripped nets beside the wall. He couldn’t swim. His head was under the water but his two hands were sticking out like they were waiting to catch a ball. I could still see his face under the lapping surface like I was looking into a dream-mirror. Then it felt like he was the one looking into the mirror and I was the reflection and it was me that was drowning. I didn’t like the feeling - that’s why I threw him the life buoy. It all felt like a dream. Read More »

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 in Forensic Examination to assess rape victims.  A noble cause, but not for him.   He moves the stack of papers to the window so his desk is clear as the charts arrive.

Fintan has just turned forty.  He has an athletic build, and a boyish face with sombre brown eyes that lend him a certain gravitas.  The bar of his new glasses runs horizontally covering the line of his eyebrows and giving him a blank expression.  As he flicks through the charts he wonders what the nature of these interactions will be.   Many consultations are purely about the body part.  Others have little or nothing to do with it. People use many levers to control each other.  Sometimes they like to recruit a professional in that game.  Husband and wife or parent and child, sometimes bring in their illness or injury as a toy to share, for you to witness, as they coyly play out their like or dislike of each other. Read More »

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 people’s funerals; otherwise they won’t go to yours’.

When I was twelve, I came home from school and said that I hated my teacher. He let the newspaper slacken in his hands and his severe, red face came into view.

‘Boy. If you’ve got nothing nice to say about someone, say nothing at all.’  And then he disappeared behind his newspaper.

I was eighteen when he finally died. Rather than lie, I gave no eulogy at all.

Outside my bedroom window a storm had found the island. Every day the sea looked more ragged and chased us further into the Atlantic. Angry waves threw themselves onto the cliffs to frighten seagulls and fishermen. No skipper could make the crossing during the storm so food was rationed and no priest came from the mainland for over a week. Read More »

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 the window at the passers-by upon the muddy, straw-strewn street. I see their glares, their stolen glances and the turmoil within my head increases in intensity. Has God invented such things to try us men, to remind us of the abyss that lies between his justice and our own? If so, He is a cruel God, the God of the Old Testament who demands the ultimate sacrifice from the faithful.

I have sought recourse in the Good Book, but have found no consolation. It has not absolved me of this which I must do, but instead left me with the foul confirmation of this course I must navigate. I struck out at my wife, when she would not cease the horrible keening and wailing of which these ragged natives are so fond. I hear her still, sobbing in her quarters, and I feel the loops of guilt tighten themselves around my weak heart. Hasty to anger I have always been- I was famed for it in my youth, and my rage has come back to haunt me. Read More »

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 feels his legs go weak, even though he’s sitting. His neck is hot; the palms of his hands are wet.

Paul had called for him at tea time, when Vinnie was sitting with his mother in the back room, not saying much. He’d been listening to the wind in the chimney and thought it funny that the wind sounded different in each ear. He hadn’t noticed that before. His mother was smoking and the deep lines in her face seemed to hold within them the hurts and disappointments of forty years of living. Read More »