5th April 2024
‘At the end of the corridor, through a door, Sylvester emerged into a games room. A skittles alley games room. It was a long room, whose centre was two brightly polished skittles alleys, and the boy. For there was a boy. There was.’
5th March 2024
‘There’s just something about the way you are together. It’s a quiet sort of thing, but I’d say it works, doesn’t it?’
7th February 2024
‘After a while he forgot he was dancing with his pen pal’s mother and he believed she forgot that he was the soft pouchy boy her daughter had brought home. That was the joy of it. They forgot themselves.‘
1st November 2023
A story by Maeve Brennan to mark her 30th anniversary: ‘All that night, she lay awake in a panic, thinking of ways to break with him. It would be heartless to tell him straight out that she had no use for him.’
11th October 2023
‘They go around the block, dancing in their seats, screaming the lyrics at the bewildered Chris, and she finds herself wishing that they’ll never get there—that they could keep driving around and around like this forever.’
13th September 2023
‘I watch myself and I know what I’m thinking. I watch myself and I also know what I’m not thinking. I watch myself and I know I’m thinking, a week ago we were together in that little cottage on the farm in Wales, and now she’s in A&E in the hospital down the road and I’m sitting here waiting for her laundry to finish.’
9th August 2023
‘When I developed my illness and could no longer work, he took pity on me and gave me a room and an allowance.’
19th July 2023
‘In the early days, people told me my disease disgusted them. They didn’t say it in those words—they used phrases like ‘I hope this email finds you well,’ but the implications were clear enough.’
21st June 2023
A story from Mary O’Donoghue’s new collection, The Hour After Happy Hour.
1st March 2023
‘I have a habit of telling stories too fast, expecting a coherent narrative to spring up from a few words flimsily strung together on a string. The problem is words words words. The more neatly I arrange them, the more they lose their flavour.’