Unravelling Oliver

by Liz Nugent

rinsed myself repeatedly under the trickle of lukewarm water dribbling out of the rusted shower head, and dried myself off in a fierce hurry using a towel so stiff and thin that I practically sanded myself.

His family had been farmers for generations. Potato farmers, and if they say you are what you eat, then the male side of our family resembled nothing if not potatoes: pale with pockmarked skin and irregular features.

is impossible to believe that so many of my compatriots did nothing, but I think genocide happens every day in some part of the world and it is easier for us to pretend that it is not happening, easier to turn off the TV or skip that column in the newspaper.

Some men, though, they shouldn’t be fathers; they are not cut out for it.