The Narrator

The window of the bedroom looked east. Toward the DART tracks and the Strand of Joyce's imagination and the sea and far beyond that to the chaotic Welsh coast. If I had to I could see the whole way in the moments before sleep. But tonight sleep would not come, though Orion slept above. Resting on his left, the celestial archer framed by the thin panels of the upper sash. The glass slumped by age differently in each, creating a quintych - would that be a word? - with a strong sense of doubt about the nature of heaven. Glass, like pain, is unstable. A super-cooled liquid which always flows. Gentle, despite its fragility. The pain which haunts my nights shifts in form as well, though direction is less defined. The woman beside me breathes in soft swells. The beagle snores. The cat watches the great hunter from the window ledge. His tail slicing through the thick of the dark. (c) 2010 by Ira David Socol

The fog rose from the Irish Sea and crawled ashore, chasing me from the Strand. I walked St. John's Road then turned north along Park Avenue and, no longer moving west, was engulfed in the salt mist. (c) Steve Conway - Fog on Dublin Bay The senses shift in the night. And I followed the smells, turf fire on the grate by turf fire on the grate, as I moved toward Sandymount Green. And I followed the vaguest of sounds, an infant's cry, an apology too loud, the sound of water draining through the pipes. All held close to me by the vapours which now soaked my hair and jumper. "You understand," my Ma had told me when I was very young, "that the pattern of the jumper is our family's. It is how we recognized the bodies of the fishermen when they washed ashore." It took me decades for the intricate cabling to not cause nightmares, and for me to ask Ma to knit one more. My mobile told me it was 3.45 when I saw the Green, soft yellow lights glowing in a bla...

timing   His watch didn't work. Well, it worked, but randomly, and offered him facts meaningless, useless, and, in this moment, reassuring. At 10:30 in the morning on the second of August, Irish Daylight Time he might say to be specific, because, he could be that specific if he put in the effort, his watch could say that it was 6:12, either a.m. or p.m. on the seventh of that month, or perhaps another, for the date was represented as only an analog number - 1 through 31 inclusive. "Why do you wear it?" she asked. He considered the standard answers; that people expected someone like him to wear a watch, that he liked the jewelry aspect of it – it's thick, clunky, cheap Soviet style, that it reminded him of which hand not to write with, but he didn't want to lie. "With this," he tapped the crystal, "time can be wherever I want it to be." And she smiled the way she did when he said things like that. addiction She had two cigar et...