You take the back roads because the motorway scares you, especially at night. Your wife says, “Really? We’re doing this? You can’t drive in a straight fucking line?” She checks her watch and folds her arms noisily. She apologises to everyone when you get there. “I’m not pointing the finger at anyone,” she says, pointing
You show me the mouldy, rotting body of yet another Siamese Fighting Fish so we stop drinking and head off. In the pet shop we stop to talk to the yellow and blue macaw which answers to the name Pauline Conway. ‘What a disgrace. It’s too big for that cage. We’d do a better job,’
He came into the room and he had no idea that he wouldn’t be leaving, at least, not the same way in which he had entered. It wasn’t that kind of room. The kind a person can just up and decide to retreat back the way they came. She was already there. Sitting. Believing. That’s
The blubber-oil lamp flickers against a wall of ice and snow. Illuminated figures loom large like shadow puppets; huge and misshapen. Their dance, dark and muted, whispering from the shadowlands. It reeks like the campfires of my youth, but here the smoke is heavily infused with brine and grease. They begin quietly and without fanfare.
Josephine cooked the fish I did not want as I stood on the back porch smoking. The garden was alive and moved with unusual sounds. The wine tasted like metal on my tongue, cold red, that’s how she drinks it and that’s how it is. Ice ice baby. The forty degree heat sizzled my cool
Just now, while you’re walking through the park, if you look up at the right-hand corner of the third floor of the hospital, you’ll see her, Bryony. You know she’s seen you; she has keen eyes and a sense for the coming and going of things. Back in her early twenties, when she was studying
He arrived on Nathan’s tenth birthday. It wasn’t a shock; it was as if Nathan had been waiting for him to appear all along. It had been a nice day, a little chaotic, but nice all the same. After opening the presents and tucking into a mountain of sandwiches, at three o’clock they cut the
About a year ago, I was at a book launch in Dublin and a card caught my eye as I was leaving. I had my newborn in the pram with me (I figured she wasn’t sleeping anyway, so she might as well come to a book launch). It was coming up to Mother’s Day, and
Surrounded by bamboo trees, Molly lounges in her stained oak rocking chair, observing her spotted male cat and wondering which Goddess showered the boy with the gift of true patience. But not the kind exhibited by humans, who simply fall into a momentary lapse of reason and stare with vacant eyes at their immediate surroundings.
Every Saturday, Luna walked to an adoption center. She put on a coat and two scarves. More often than not, she carried a piece of fruit. One Saturday, it was a peach. She rolled it between her fingers, by turns gentle, then violent. Luna needed a family. She wanted a child that wasn’t too young
