bahern7

  Mish, I’m throwing in the towel not with a sense of defeat but rather a sense of pastures new (sunny uplands even). We’ve reached nigh on fifty pages, and in print the lines look straight and true, as beautiful (almost) as the new steps fronting the Leavey Building (church end). It’s time to run the thing off and let it stand on its own fifty legs. Not as a work of art, granted, but certainly as testimony to the strength and power of the epistolary form. But whoa! I must rein in my logorrhoea lest I stray into the realm of melodrama. My final shot goeth like this: a cold coming I had of it this morning lugging my corpus to the desk. A local access road was closed  and I was forced to trudge through a barren field before I could rejoin civilisation and proceed to Dublin ’s heart. The field was rocky and frozen and populated by a large flock of Stymphalian birds who tracked my steps with dagger glares. At least I think they were Stymphalian birds though they may have been ...

 

  The four of them shared a house in one of the newer estates that had sprung up on the edge of the city during the boom. A three-bedroom semi with all mod cons, the online ad had said. Kate Berry and Tom Finn, a couple of two years standing, along with Ruby Mee and Breffni Ashton, singletons who—though not averse to one another’s charms—were content to keep things platonic. Simply put: the randomness of a lettings website was what brought these four together. On the surface at least the living arrangements were working reasonably well. Everybody got along okay even if the others found Breffni’s behaviour a tad odd. Notwithstanding this fact, the cooking, cleaning, shopping and watching of TV in the evening, all ran to a smooth order. However, the awkward matter remained: none of the other three knew the full extent of Breffni’s drug problem. Although he masked it superbly, he was a man in the throes of a chronic cocaine addiction. Colombian marching powder, Florida snow, pri...

The writer Grudgeville got most of his inspiration sitting on Dublin ’s Liffey boardwalk, pen and notebook in hand, observing the scene. Each morning, he would make the short journey from his apartment and position himself on the wooden bench that ran the length of the structure. Generally, he liked to sit by the O’Connell Bridge end of the action. All human life was there—teeming; from the high and noble to the low and base, and everyone else in between. At any given moment, Grudgeville could look around to see glamour models posing on fashion shoots, legal eagles scurrying to the courts, minor and major celebrities taking daily walks, mothers with prams, women with boyfriends, shop workers, office workers, business folk, and the ever present junkies—obsessing on their fix—and willing to do anything required to sate their need. Also gliding by with considerable frequency was a far more famous writer than Grudgeville: the renowned MacGnaw. MacGnaw—a firm believer in rotating the cr...

                                                        C loda Pringle, 22, was heavily involved in the students’ union at her college in the southeast of Ireland. 2020 had been a year like no other for everyone on campus. Lectures were delivered online in light of the pandemic and Cloda had been confined to her campus apartment for weeks on end with only her roommates Clinton and Autumn for company. Luckily, she got along  well with both of them. When they heard about an anti-fascist protest that was to be held in Dublin that coming Saturday, they thought it would be a perfect idea to attend. In fact, they were really fired up for it. Social media was alive with posts imploring students to come from all corners of the land and to voice their protest outside Leinster House where a pint-sized little Hitler wannabe from something called the Iri...

                                               Todd Flesk was riding in a taxicab to the museum district of Ole Zork City. Smoking heavily, he was bearing up considering—on top of his own woes—the cabdriver’s plangent whine which filled the car with an air of great miserableness. The problem for the driver was a constant stream of cyclists whizzing to within a whisker of his bonnet before veering off from it as quickly as they’d arrived. Todd sensed the poor fellow had reached a tipping point to full mental breakdown and could relate to the man’s state quite readily. A raft of unsettling thoughts raced in and out of the Flesk brain and a sardonic smile grazed his lips at how similar it all seemed to the bicycles brushing the chrome so perilously.  —“Of course it’ll all be my fault,” El Wheels keened, and he slapped his hand off the wheel in a show of frustration...