"A Misplaced Homecoming"

As Jack Delaney walked the five minutes to his ex wives house, he felt the beginnings of a rain shower. He approached the door, knocked, and felt the old familiar tightening in his chest.

She came to the door. "You know you don't need to knock, you can just come in." she said.

"That's OK" he replied, "I don't like to just walk in, you know, unannounced."

He took his shoes off as he stepped in and handed her the bag off oranges he had picked earlier that morning. "Here, a gift" he said as he handed them to her. She took them and said thanks.

He said hi to the boy who was playing with Lego bricks on the floor. His son was concentrating hard on putting together what looked like some kind of space ship and hadn't noticed him enter.

He went over and kissed him on the head, then asked if her parents had got away OK.

"Yeah, no problems. They left at two on the dot as usual. You know what dad's like."

He replied with a weak smile, but didn't say anything.

"Do you want a tea"? she asked."No. I just came to give you the oranges and say goodnight, but, thanks anyway".

He sat down on the floor beside the boy and watched him stick the finishing pieces onto the space ship.

"Looks great kiddo", "Thanks", the boy replied without looking up.
He stood up and watched her as she worked in the tiny kitchen, making dinner.


He had been in this same house only the day before. He knew she would be out as it was a Saturday. He had a key and would come over and do odd jobs for her occasionally, when she was at work and the boy was at school.

Walking around the empty house his head was filled with images from the past, when they had lived here as a family. He had walked up the stairs to her bedroom. He sat on the bed and remembered vividly for a moment the day they had bought it. How different things had been then. A different time, different city, different lives. He touched the pillow where she slept and lay down. He felt tired, old, empty. Getting up, he saw a picture he had made for her out of magazine clippings when their son had been born. He picked it up and rubbed the dust of the frame and put it back. Then he went down stairs and left, locking the door behind him and putting the bottom bolt in place so she wouldn't know he had been there.

As he got up she stopped what she was doing. "Have you eaten today?" she asked.

"Sorry?" he replied, pretending he hadn't heard her.

"Do you want to stay for dinner?"

"No, I better go, I've got stuff to do".

He went to say goodbye to the boy who was now sitting at the dining table looking at a toy catalog, but stopped and stood for a moment.

He turned back and looked at her. She was bent over trying to find something in one of the cupboards.

"Can you believe we were once in Love with each other?" he said.

She looked at him and he saw a slight nervous smile appear around her mouth. She didn't say anything. He continued, feeling his breath quickening, "I mean, can you believe how we couldn't bear to be apart, to be away from each other, how much in love we were"?
She looked away. "What is it? Do you need to talk?" she asked.

They looked at each other for a brief moment. He felt his stomach drop and he purposely exhaled and took a sharp breath. "No, no I don't want to talk. What is there to talk About?" She stood in silence looking at him.

He turned to the boy and said goodnight, asked him for a kiss, put on his shoes and went to leave. He heard her say something as he opened the door, but he wasn't listening and didn't reply. He closed the door lightly and stepped out onto the path that led to the street.

By now the rain was coming down heavy. He wrapped his coat around him, noticing the bottom button was missing, and started walking home.

By anthony MONAGHAN

"This Dark Star" by A. Monaghan

This dark star is all sadness, all sorrow.
It is blinding, deafening and unforgiving,
offers no light, no sound and no relief,
to the one caught in it's orbit.
Like a door of thick, heavy glass.
Frosted and warped, distorting all reality,
it reduces the entire cosmos into
a single dot of pure black pain...an atom of despair.
a black hole that sucks everything into
an eternal and endless night,
shooting cold shards of ice
to pierce the heart and freeze the soul.
This dark star is always present,
it has no future and no past.
It is the weight of the whole of creation
pressing and diminishing everything
into a drowned nothing,
in a soulless and drowned world.

Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry

Malcolm Lowry, writer. 28 July 1909 – 26 June 1957

"My secrets are of the grave, and must be kept, and this is how I sometimes think of myself...as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world. But the name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course, but in the heart..." Extract from "Under The Volcano".

Malcolm Lowry was born near Liverpool, Cheshire, England in 1909 and educated at The Leys School and St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. He came from a family of four boys all of whom described their mother as cold and distant, something Lowry would carry with him for the rest of his adult life.

Between school and university at the age of 17, Lowry enrolled as a deckhand and sailed to the far east. This experience provided the material for his first novel Ultramarine which was published in 1933. It is the story of a privileged young man and his need to be accepted, by his shipmates. The story takes place during 48-hours on board a tramp steamer, the Oedipus Tyrannus, “outward bound for Hell.” The ship is caught in a furious tempest and the experience of the terrified animals aboard ship, being transported to western Zoo's from the far East brings to life for the first time Lowry's extraordinary prose and his relationship with subjects of death and the descent to hell. Like most of Lowry’s work it is a semi - autobiographical work, and contains themes he would later develop in "Under the Volcano"(1947).

By the time Lowry came to start work on "Under The Volcano" he was 27, living in Mexico, separated from his first wife, and already an alcoholic on the slow hellish slide that would end with his suicide at the age of 48 from an overdose of gin and barbiturate sleeping tablets.

"Under The Volcano" was published in 1947 after many rejections and re-writes, and at the time was hailed as the successor to James Joyces "Ulysees". Lowry was described as a genius, but all of this merely added to his unabated alcoholism and mental instability. He re-married and moved to British Colombia, settling in a lakeside cabin which eventually burnt down. Lowry was a haunted man and it was this interior, hellish landscape that he couldn't escape from no matter where he settled.

Despite the agonies of his addiction to alcohol, Lowry wrote and worked nearly constantly. In many ways, the only other artist to compare Lowry to, in his self destruction and constant seeking for salvation from himself, is the painter Jackson Pollock. The difference being that it is regarded Pollock created his best work during a long period of abstinence from alcohol, where as alcohol fueled and fired Lowry's writing. Indeed it has been said of "Under The Volcano", that no other book captures the life of the alcoholic quite as acutely and in such raw and unnerving detail.

Of Lowry's other work, the novella "Lunar Caustic" really brings home the true cost of Lowry's alcoholism. It’s the story of Bill Plantagenet who, after a long night’s drinking, awakens to find himself in New York’s notorious Bellevue psychiatric hospital (based on events taken from Lowry's earlier life in New York) surrounded by the truly dispossessed and insane. The story is as much about Lowry as it is about the “anxieties of the age he lived in.” Early versions were published in literary magazines, and Lowry eventually created a novella he thought too painful to publish in his own lifetime.

Malcolm Lowry seems to have slipped into obscurity when compared to other writer's of his generation, perhaps owing to his short life and relatively small amount of printed work, but it is undeniable that "Under The Volcano" is indeed a work of genius, to be read and re-read, and that no other work exists like it to this day.

In 1976, Malcolm Lowry's life and his greatest work were the subject of an Oscar nominated documentary, Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry. It is a brilliantly paced and unflinching look at the man, his life, his work and the demons that possessed and drove him. With readings from the late Richard Burton and interviews with family members, colleagues, friends and his second wife Marjorie Bonner, the film brings Lowry's pain and neurosis to life in vivid and unsettling detail. To truly understand the work and life off this great writer, and his 'dark night of the soul', read "Under The Volcano", then read it again.

"The Critic" by A. Monaghan

He stands at the mirror and doesn't like what he sees, hates it and turns away. After a few minutes he drops his shoulders and turns back and faces himself, looks himself in those grey green eyes for a long time and sees nothing.

He rubs his coarse chin, picks up the toothbrush and starts to clean his teeth. The water brings a sharp pain to the broken tooth, the decaying tooth, a thought passes through his mind "You deserve this pain, this decay. You deserve THIS".

He begins the routine, washing his hands. The icy water is a shock, he starts to turn on the hot water tap but turns it off again. "You don't deserve hot water, You don't deserve warmth or comfort. You're a bastard, you're a drunk, you're a waste. You don't deserve anything"!

He washes his face in the cold water and as he rinses he sees his sons tiny toothbrush in the cup on the edge of the sink, "You're a bad father, you're a failure, a shit, a selfish, impatient asshole, not a man, not a person, you're nothing"

He rubs his face dry and feels a familiar wave of heavy remorse settle on his chest. He sighs loudly, turns off the light and moves towards the bedroom. Their is a weight now in his stomach, a ball of pure black hate. Hate for this bed, hate for this night, hate for this body, hate for this life. "You are unlovable, you are ugly, unbearable. You'll be alone forever, live alone, die alone and it's all you deserve".

"Stop...stop"! he says out loud, and then, "Just stop" in a quiet, defeated voice. He turns out the light and gets into bed, staring into the darkness and the silence for a long time. Finally he closes his eyes and allows himself to sleep.