Jill’s assignment as a new reporter was to interview an old bell ringer standing next to a red kettle outside a Walmart. Her editor had told her the man has been ringing the bell every ...
Six men were sitting at the table in the Day Room, as they call it, at the Whitehall Rest Home. They were playing poker and they had a newcomer in their midst. It was Bill, a retired fa...
Two new crutches and two double shots of Bushmills Irish Whiskey enabled Joe Faherty to move from the back seat of Moira Murphy’s 1976 Buick into Eagan’s Funeral Home for Tim McGillicud...
Two men running for office disagree about everything but have one thing in common. They won’t release their tax returns.
Something’s still bright when a widow dies and her son flies in gives her body to science has the movers
Forget the fall equinox. Fall arrives when all the moths that dance on summer nights around the porch light disappear when the first cold dawn appears.
He’s always believed people of every faith can live in peace together in America no matter what happens
We hung suet out on the deck today hoping the wrens would come and stay the winter,
Jimmy and Billy, two young men in kindergarten, went home from school every day just before noon. They lived in a small town in Nebraska, in the middle of farm country. It was the 1950s...
Bug no bigger than a comma scales the wall next to my recliner. He’s climbing
When Normal Norman takes his seat in Room 220 in Dumbach Hall to hear the eminent Dr. Engelhard… recite Beowulf again, Norman knows that he can suck
Otis was once a monk who took no vows, was free to leave the abbey and eventually he did. I met him over chicken wings
If the greatest of these is charit… then tell me again why it’s gauche if this young man in a booth at a bar
Third day on her honeymoon Sharon asks Butch what it’s like for a man before he gets married. A bricklayer by trade, and a man of few words,
That my parents were Irish immigrants is probably the most significant factor in my writing life. The English expelled my father from Ireland around 1920 at age 18 or so for running gun...