Knock Knock, Open Wide

by Neil Sharpson

a mad rush of stress, drinking too much, eating too little, insecurity, and anxiety that would years later, somehow, bake and cool in her memory as happiness.

a man who wants to listen is seldom in want of a welcome.

There were curses to be learned, such as the infamous Malacht Cromail: May you carry your child until its twentieth year, which Betty vowed to work into casual conversation at every opportunity.

This is Connemara. Not a county, not a province. A place that existed before counties, before provinces. A land. A stillness.

She’d been having a lot of bad thoughts recently. She’d been pulling them up like weeds every hour of every day for weeks. She was starting to lose the fight. She was starting to succumb to sheer exhaustion, trying not to think the things that she was thinking.

Shops and cafés were like mayflies, but pubs were trees.

He seemed to be of an age where the years were now haphazardly piling their gifts on top of him. He could have been in his eighties or nineties or past the century. The wrinkles were too numerous to be read. White noise on the skin.