He was always a fish guy. Rice. Broccoli. Simple. Tasty. The first meal he ever made for me was back when he owned a toaster oven. Fish sticks. Tater tots. It probably took him no more than fifteen minutes to put together. I watched him from the kitchen table. Now and then he’d stop what he was doing, bend to kiss me. Remark on something or other. Sip from a glass of chilled wine. Whistle softly while he plated up.

Brecken Hancock | Tolka Issue Two, August 2024 I take my phone to bed – my husband on one side, my cell on the other. I face my cell. * It starts with a skim of scalp. The cadaver of a Texan murderer who died of lethal injection was encased and frozen in gelatine, then ground down on the axial plane, one millimetre at a time. Photographs of his 1,871 cryosections compile like leaves of a book; a stack of rectos; a secret turf of nerves (stubs of axons and dendritic miles); atrial chambers; a bog of colon; fat; furls of brain; and tendons, imprecisely milled, smeared across the surfaces. * He wasn’t sliced. In a university lab in Denver, a motorised, rotating disk of sandpaper scoured him away, turning him to frozen, cadaveric dust. * Each milling of his corpse revealed an aerial view of viscera – a slab...

Isobel O’Donovan | Tolka Issue Four, February 2025 I remember my mother’s voice in the kitchen, as though choruses of her could spill from an opened cupboard. Among the delft and vocal cords, a nestle of laughs and cries pushed through the yellow yolk of the sun streaming through the window. My infant head laid on her chest, ear pressed to lung like a shell whispering of the sea. The place where sleep seeps through a tablecloth like spilt milk, ink. When the Internet unfastens my limbs from my mind, it is to this warm, lullabied body that I long to return. Something punctures the memory – a niggling feeling of is that all? Such multitudes of experience shaped into an apron by the cookiecutter of nostalgia. It’s better now, I think, as the clock counts hours that are just for me, no nappy cloth frozen solid on the line....

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Issue Four, March 2023 In July 2022 I set up a conversation over Zoom between two authors and friends, Nicole Flattery and Colin Barrett. I sent them a list of questions, asked them to hit record and left them to it. Nicole Flattery is a writer and critic from Mullingar, County Westmeath. Her short-story collection, Show Them a Good Time, was published by the Stinging Fly Press and Bloomsbury in 2019. Her first novel, Nothing Special, is set against the backdrop of Andy Warhol’s Factory in 1960s New York, and was published in March 2023. Colin Barrett is a writer from County Mayo. His first short-story collection, Young Skins, was published by the Stinging Fly Press in 2013 and his second collection, Homesickness, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2022. His debut novel will be published in late 2023. The questions I sent to Nicole and Colin...