A Handful of Stars

  The Hand That Feeds. The man carried his father on his shoulders and felt numb. The old man was finally gone. He carried the dead weight wrapped in animal skins from the bothy made of evergreen boughs down through the forest to the place of ritual.  This last responsibility lay upon his shoulders. He could feel the corpse growing even colder as his breath steamed in the starlit air. He was the only one left to fend for the old man. His mother had died last winter, and they had carried her on this same journey together. His father had stopped at the stream where, racked with tears, he had let slip her beaded necklace into the waters. The beaded necklace, his first love token to her then, was now offered to Danu deposited in the waters of life.  He reached the stream. He lowered his father gently sideways onto the bank. What could he offer? Despite the biting cold, he reached beneath his clothing to remove his purse. Loosening the thong, he slipped three gold nugget...

  Indestructible              The price had been his mistake. Nobody sells the Boss Audio BV9351B Double DIN car stereo for just €100. He had done the usual checks: no short hair, no clean shaven, no leather shoes, no six foot or taller, cash only, no time wasters. But this guy could have been his brother, couldn’t he? He was that rough looking, like someone homeless. He had the ganga smell on his vintage Thin Lizzy  t shirt and his converse were scuffed and worn. Jaden even wondered if he was good for the cash or was about to pull a stanley knife on him. Then the bracelets slapped down on his wrists as he was handing over the stereo, while he was standing right there handing it over and Jaden spotted the white earbuds, sending and receiving, recording and storing evidence. There it was. Game over. The mock buyer stood up straight, no longer slouched and pathetic looking.His voice grew stronger as his eyes took o...

  The Feast of St. John  How to light a candle in the wind?  That was the question. Lizzie slipped into the back of Our Lady of Dolours Church on Glasnevin Hill. She covered her head with her grey hoodie and blessed herself three times. Then she scoped out the dim interior. There were plenty of what her mother would have called ‘shawlies’ laying siege to the candlelit statues of St.Therese of Lisieux , The Holy Family and the Sacred Heart with His crown of thorns that always reminded her of Romeo and Juliet. Not good, not good at all.  She let herself feel her rapidly beating heart. Life had a cost but it also had a pulse. Each second it seemed to throb, thum thump, thum thump, thum thump. She would outwait and outwit the biddy patrol that stood between her and her goal. Well they knelt mostly with hands clasped together, backs bent and misshapen under fur collars and expensive tweeds, eyes clamped shut in case the Lord should suddenly decide to reveal himself in all...

  The Fox  I swore and slammed on the brakes as a wild fox ran across the country road in front of me. Then it hit me what day it was. It was the 5th of July, a day that for me signified loss and heartache. It was my own personal Good Friday, the day a saviour died for me. Once again the questions arose in my mind. Did he know when he went out that night? Was he fooling himself or just trying to fool me? Either way I knew I was the one responsible for this enormous tragedy. Ordinarily, I would not have been startled by the appearance of a fox but this was no ordinary day. This was Paddy Fox’s Anniversary, a full year since our school caretaker had been run down on this isolated country road in the middle of the night. I got to the spot where it happened, got out of the car and found the weathered wooden cross in the undergrowth and stood in silence. I did not pray. I hadn’t earned the right. His mangled body had been thrown awkwardly into a ditch as he was coming home from the...

  Moriarty and The Mouse  There are certain smells that bring back memories of depression, that return me to  my younger self down among the cycling sleepwalkers.There was the sharp tang of rubber tyres rolling down the olfactory nerve, connecting with the musty fumes of  woollen winter overcoats saturated by sleeting rain. Secondary school students crouched over chrome handlebars, steam rising from their warm backs in the dim of the school bicycle shed. A cold, grey concrete confirmation that you were moving underground lit by the meagre light of grimy basement windows. The sky-blue congealed paint of the spiked georgian railings, prevented the fourteen foot drop onto the rubbish strewn stone flagstones of the basement level outside.There, sloping down at forty degrees was a concrete ramp. It descended sharply first one way and then the other to stop us cycling down it. We dismounted, passed one by one through the narrow gate and slow-wheeled our bicycles down, into...