April 19, 2010 – 11:23 pm
He was an electrician by trade, but his passion was chopping wood. I had travelled far from my northern home as he had from his in the red Outback, and we found each other in the grey stone hostel underneath Edinburgh’s mammoth castle.
Chiseled valleys and stiff peaks of ridged muscle [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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April 11, 2009 – 12:57 pm
As People walked their dogs through the park they usually overlooked the four redbrick buildings between the trees. There were many buildings hidden within the park, like the place where the guards’ boss sat in his office and the President’s house. The buildings were home to men who didn’t quite fit in. Every collection of [...]
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