Galway Stories

I met her in the kind of rain that makes Dublin look like it has been painted in watercolour. It was outside Hodges Figgis on Dawson Street, where I had stopped under…

I met Clara in a queue outside the old Screen Cinema when we were both nineteen and pretending we knew more about foreign films than we did. It was raining with that…

I came to Dublin for a woman and pretended for years that I had come for work. That was easier to say at parties. “There are more opportunities here,” I’d tell people,…

The first thing Maeve remembered was the smell of rain on the steps of the Hugh Lane Gallery. She said it before she said my name, though my name did not come…

I met him on a wet Tuesday outside Connolly Station, both of us pretending the rain was not getting through our coats. I had just moved to Dublin from Mayo and was…

Two days before my wedding, I was standing in the alterations room of a small bridal shop off South William Street, watching a woman pin the hem of my dress, when I…

I knew it was over before he said the sentence. It was in the way he took off his coat and kept it folded over his arm, like he had no intention…

I met Niamh on a wet Thursday outside Connolly Station, both of us trying to shelter under the same useless strip of awning while the rain came sideways across Amiens Street. She…

I met him on a wet Thursday evening outside Grogan’s, the kind of rain that does not fall so much as hang in the air and slowly claim you. I was twenty-six,…