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Lessons
Continue reading: LessonsThe soup smell, the weeds, the dim heat. He lived there with his sickly mother, who was chronically bed-ridden. Sometimes I doubted whether she was real or not; she never made a sound, never emerged. Supposedly she was dying.
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Skins
Continue reading: SkinsI perch myself on the steel stool beside the worktable—needles, pliers, penknife, and thread spools all laid in a row on its chrome surface. When I press my boot on the foot pedal, the conveyor belt cranks and whirrs, and the morning’s first load of assorted critters rumbles toward me. I start in on a…
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A Sound Heard By Heaven
Continue reading: A Sound Heard By HeavenThomas didn’t answer. He had, in fact, booked the trip after his sister found him curled up in the tub at his new apartment, shivering under a shower that had run cold. She called her husband, a self-styled amateur psychologist with a graduate degree in botany, and the two of them staged an intervention.
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The Short and the Long of It
Continue reading: The Short and the Long of ItHe’s forty-four. I think forty-fuckable. I check his height and it occurs to me that I’ve finally grown. Or maybe I’m just getting it now, the whole life thing. What’s certain is at thirty-sexy I’m getting on. I want someone to go home to. It’s why I’ve been craving an opportunity to scold my parents…
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Annemarie Ní Churreáin
Continue reading: Annemarie Ní ChurreáinIrish poet and Kerouac House resident Annemarie Ní Churreáin reads at Functionally Literate.