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Short Stories

It was the middle of August when she realised. Night was falling, hiding the world beneath its inky veil. The windowpanes glowed yellow, the light spilling out and illuminating the garden table where they sat. The drum of music floated on the balmy air. The bushes hummed with invisible life. She

I can’t remember the first time I met Luke. That’s the problem with meeting someone in real life: in retrospect, it’s usually hard to pinpoint your first interaction with them, because there were too many other things going on at the same time. I can vividly recall, however, the exact feeling

Heaven seems rounder at night. It cloches us, breathing frost. The weather is fine; no one will worry about Lina until morning. Thank God for the illness that shrunk her in childhood, made her delicacy indelicate, pocked her and put her at the edge of protection. Thank God there is no God, only h

Jack Rosenberg blew into our lives when I was twelve; any way you looked at him (up, down or even sideways) you saw cash. On Long Island, he was one of those super-rich snobby neighbours who only nodded hello, because he didn’t want to waste a whole wave on us. When we ran into him in Florida, he

My father liked setting the clock an hour fast so he could enjoy the fact it was really only 6.00am and not 7.00am which meant he could have an extra hour’s sleep each morning before he got up for work. In addition, the clock gained five minutes every day, so when I needed to catch a bus from my h

He must have received the letter on Tuesday – perhaps Wednesday, but most likely Tuesday. He wouldn’t have gone down to collect the post immediately; he would have seen the postman arrive from the upstairs study window, registered an arrival of correspondence, but continued at his desk, the same

My biggest secret is that you licked off my right nipple. Shame in the shape of absence. Making love with men was a dream for months. I thought to myself – you will understand the pain of a cold bed, once you’re grown. But what do you know about it now, now that you are? Then, you were a glob

She made her way slowly up the stairs. She had changed for the evening, though it was barely teatime. The dress in heavy luxurious blue silk flowed in opulent folds from her restricted waist. At the top of the stairs, she had to catch her breath. The action gave her some satisfaction. Her hair was p

Juliette takes the familiar curve toward home, gliding through the sun-dappled foliage of Alpine foothills in midsummer. She is tonguing the scab of an old thought, a thing left undone. The natural gas inlet pipe for their water heater is electrified – said with many grimaces and much swearing by

My husband and I live along a West Cork boreen. Heather and gorse brocade the fields, and the hedges are heavy with hawthorn and blackthorn. Some evenings, this landscape seems to exhale an almost uncanny light. We are both in our forties, and work from home. We collaborate on ‘historical rom