Triona. Pat. John. Jenny. Anne. – Susanne Wawra

It was green. The guy in the shop said lime green but I called it flash green, because if I ran really fast past you wearing it, all you would see is a flash of green. I tried it on and ran around the shop for a while shouting “flash green, flash green!” The shop…
Read More

“Sure, he’s an awful bollocks,” Dermot said as he tore off the corner foil from his packet of peanuts. “He’d be expecting to do well in the town and nobody likes him.” Christy watched him empty the peanuts onto his thick palm. “I know that, Dermot. I do. And there’d be no need for another…
Read More

Mother. Here we are, then. The call you told me was inevitable, the one where I come crawling back and, in your incomparable imagination, you open your arms and welcome me, darling misguided duckling, back into the fold. I wonder, though, if I managed to exceed even your most outlandish predictions for how long I…
Read More

I can’t lie. Sometimes, I do wonder if they can understand. Every once in a while, a glint will flash in an eye as I pass, or a lip will curl, and I’ll think: Wait. Did I just see that? By the time I manage to check it out, of course, the fleeting impression has…
Read More

If the strips are the soldiers, is the egg the war?  Ah fuck it, what does it matter? Just scalp the baldy bastard. Drown the first fucker. Squirt sticky yellow yolky gunky goo all down his sides. Outside the rain is shittin’ all over everything. He appears in the doorway like something out of ‘The…
Read More

‘Sssh! There he is now…’ Nan Phelan wouldn’t have known subtlety if it hit her in the face with a wet fish. ‘It’s not him.’ Her sister and co-owner of Phelan’s Corner Store was equally loud in her denial. ‘I’m telling you, it is.’ ‘Be the hokey, you could be right.’ I couldn’t be blamed…
Read More

The heat rose in waves like angry mobs assailing an insouciant government, its leaders smug in knowing that their hoary redoubt will withstand the pounding of the sea of change, secure in knowing that there will be no sea change. It was August, dog days and all, a time when one’s thoughts naturally turn to…
Read More

My father is getting smaller. I remember him standing tall at six foot two. He used to lift me up high onto his shoulders and I’d sit there, King of the World. My mother would roar at him to put me down before I fell to my death. He always did what she said. But…
Read More

‘I can’t,’ said Liam halfway up the ladder gripping the sides like his hands were glued to it. ‘Ya have ta get a bit higher,’ said Jack who was looking up from the ground. Jack was wearing a heavy Guinness polo shirt, which he probably got free in some bar tucked over his beer belly…
Read More