Stories tagged james-claffey

Apparition of the BVM

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The hose was used to suffocate the parish priest.

A Chalice from Viking Times

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I remember how he’d mop up the oil from the sardine can with his bread and smack his lips together in delight at the taste.

Motherlove

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she hides her stash in an old coffee can beneath a pile of chopped wood where the black widows plot revenge against the world

Fragment: Bacon & Earwax

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Janey smiled, her straight white teeth blinding bright, but Sam eyed Calico like a cat about to eat a fish. He looked dopey, she thought, but nice, yes, nice.

Polishing Fruit

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And your man with the tweed overcoat and trilby? Would you look at the legs on him; Shirley Fucking MacLaine.

The Air Fair Crackling

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These days, she resides in a facility in the north of the city, her once-curly hair now shorn gray on her dappled skull.

Straight Roads & Gentle Swells

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The world is a private one, the container of secrets and shames, of reputations and damage done over years, of stark landscapes and icy skies.

Profession of Faith

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John Prine’s “Bruised Orange” plays in the small cabin as mosquitos swarm about the bare light bulbs attached to the outside walls of the buildings.

A Patch of Olive Oil

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Afraid of open water, he swims only in the local YMCA pool, where he goggle-eyes the young girls and feels the weight of his fiftieth year pulling him towards the bottom.

A Dollop of Love

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Mary Magdalene might’ve given him a dollop of love for the terrible pain. There, my father remarked was a woman, a barefaced hussy, forgiven her sins by “a better man than I, Gunga Din,” he’d say.

The Sweetness of the Practiced Stroke

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The swing creaked to-and-fro in the fog, the absence of a child telling everything except the why.

Claire & Nestor

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Nestor had gummed her ear, his hands pinching her flesh, the smooth edges of his molars flattening painfully the lobe. “Piggy, piggy, I love your skin,” he whispered, her back arched over the junk of dead wringers and fridges without doors in the city dum

Empty Chairs

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Martha soaps my skinny bones and washes what she calls my "undercarriage."

Growing Up

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Shite like Abba and the Brotherhood of Man got a fast fuck-off, whilst the J. Geils Band and Jackson Browne got deposited in a brown paper bag and paid for with cash stolen from whatever cash register I might have been in charge of that week.

Tuesday May 8th 1912. One hour’s burial in the poor ground of Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.

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Dairyman’s Child—the child of John and Jane Larkin—Measles John’s tears soured the milk for all of Sheriff Street for a month