Exeter Writers

Malachy Doyle  by  Morgan Brennan He stared at the coals. Their heat had dissipated around the room and now they were past their prime. Remnants winked from the hearth like warnings. Red to ash grey. Stop. Don’t go. Malachy Doyle leant back in his favourite armchair and sucked on his pipe. The aromatic mixture filled his mouth, throat and lungs and he held his breath as if he were drowning before extracting the mouthpiece to exhale a great grey plume.   ‘Fecking eejits.’     Doyle knew he was past his prime and knew they’d be on their way. The men in the trench-coats and black berets. The Belfast Brigade. Coming for Malachy Doyle. Former foot soldier and champion of Cowan Street. The Newry firebrand whose fire had gone out. The phone call. “Is it Malachy Doyle I’m speaking to?”   “Tis he. Who’s calling?”   “That doesn’t matter. You listen. You’ve been seen talking to the RUC again and then one of my men gets arrested the following morn—" “Now hold...

 A List of Some of the Times I Cried On My Mother's Shoulder  by  Jay McKenzie That time when she was me and I was her and we were one and the same except we weren’t because she was Mother and she held me to her shoulder and let my soft tears soak into her pyjama top, her shirt, her skin, and I cried to her because I was cold, I was hungry, I was confused and because that was my language and she the only other speaker.   That time when I slipped, not from my bike like the other kids, but from my brother’s scooter because he was big and I was small and I wanted to be him and so I tried but nobody told me that balance is a learned thing, and I was still trying to stand up straight as a tree, and the skin peeled from my leg like bark leaving pitted cherry juice all over my knee, and sand and snot mingled on the light windbreaker she used to wear in spring.   That time when she said not to climb the fence outside Presto and I tore my dungarees from ankle to bum, and...

 Salt   by  Jillian Grant Shoichet My task was to salt the slugs.               As dawn stole beneath the scant slip of fabric tacked to the window frame, I crept from the bed I shared with my sister.             I slid past the bathroom, with its leaky faucet whose drip-drip-drip was the soundtrack of my childhood, along with the throbbing growl of the train that lumbered through the blackberries beyond the gravel path three times a day: 6:06, 3:14, and 11:20, like clockwork. Down the hall on the left to avoid the squeaky floorboard on the right. Across the edge of the balding carpet that marked the boundary of the living room, where my mother now sleeps on a pull-out couch, pills by her head, lined face awash in flickering blue light from the television.             Towards the stained Formica table wit...