"Today starts off like this. A man walks into the coffee shop, well-dressed, bearded, bespectacled, newspaper under his arm, and he appears normal, even gregarious: Geez it’s warm in here, is what he says .... Dara gives a nervous laugh and says, ‘Oh yeah man, I suppose it’s fairly cosy alright.’ And he, the bearded man, says, ‘Do you have the heat going? Full blast?’ Now this is a warning sign, if anyone’s counting – but today, more than other days, is about picking battles."

'Today' --a new story by emerging writer Aileen Armstrong takes place in the warmest coffee shop in a wintry city, a crossroads for people whose lives are in limbo. This is a humorous piece, familiar to anyone who has experienced that 'waiting for my life to start' feeling. Armstrong's début collection is forthcoming from Doire Press. CLICK HERE TO READ 'TODAY'.

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‘We don’t really know. We haven’t had time yet to think it through properly.’ That’s what Grace said. JJ and herself had just come back into the room. Half an hour earlier they’d snaked off somewhere else in the Pope’s house for a ride. What I’d asked was ‘what the hell are you two doing here seeing as you’ve both been dead for years’.

The Underground--November's story, like Halloween which has just passed, marks a liminal space between the living and the dead. The darkest of satire, Dave Lordan's story takes us through the struggle of a homeless father to make a life for himself and his daughter on the streets of Rome. Think Jonathan Swift meets Christopher Marlowe.

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