His words from a few nights ago come back to her, slurred by at least half a bottle of ouzo.

What lovely people Joe and Lisa were, how great the evening had been. How lucky they were to have met them. How he thought Lisa was like a gazelle. This last had slipped out and he'd had the grace to be embarrassed. The Yeats poem, you know, he'd said, trying to take refuge in literary provenance. Yes, she'd said, she knew the poem. Earlier, Lisa's boyfriend Joe, a cheerful, sandyhaired man, had seemed comfortably oblivious of the crackle of energy in their midst.

An experienced sailor, it was he who had proposed that they go sailing for a few days. The four of them.

STORY OF LOSS By First Fiction winner, Ronan Doyle "Will you tell me this, " asked Dad, 'how did you get the ham so tender?'" We ate in silence. I listened to my parents eating their food.

Than Mam put down her knife and started to cry. I traced lines in the gravy with my fork. Dad put his hand on Mam's, the two of them sitting like that, whispering, comforting each other. I couldn't hear what they were saying.

Nobody ate anything. The food steamed. Johnny Adam singing 'I'm the Little Boy that Santa Claus Forgot' and I didn't know where to look. I couldn't even look at his photo.

It was Mam who saw the note on the kitchen table. He wrote, "I am in the garage, " and she groaned like she was sick. My father was roaring. Pulling at his legs, his ankles. I don't forget the way my brother moved in the air when Dad took his hands from his body. I ran to the kitchen and took a long knife from the drawer, thinking I could cut him down.

But, as it was, I stayed in the kitchen for a long time, turning the blade in my hand. I stared at my reflection in the window, and I waited until the shouting had stopped, until everything was quiet.

NORA AND JIM By Emerging Poetry winner, Majella Cullinane I always said he should have given up the writing years ago. He was better at singing My Jim. Though as he sleeps beside me in this hospital bed, his eyes strange without their spectacles, hardly much use now, his sight is almost gone. I remember the cut of him the day we first met on Nassau St, himself only out of college and so mad with the world, full of fancy notions of how he'll be the one to leave.

I didn't think he'd take me along, but he did . . .

Trieste, Paris, back to Dublin, Zurich. . .

I like Trieste the best. It was where the two young ones were born.

and now no more.

I've lost many things in life.

One still remains . . . my family name, Barnacle, a sea creature with a hard shell, that's what Jim said.

Mostly, I think you find them on whales and after Nora, even after all these years.