Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Infelicitous
    Infelicitous
    Infelicitous
    Ebook115 pages1 hour

    Infelicitous

    By Michael Noctor

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    This is a story of grief, of loss, of love. It is one man's battle against the ravages of time.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael Noctor
    Release dateApr 20, 2018
    Infelicitous

    Read more from Michael Noctor

    Related to Infelicitous

    Related ebooks

    Classics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Same Story

      Mar 29, 2021

      FROM ISSUE #53: MISTAKES SUZANNE ROBERTS is the author of Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (Bronze Medal Winner from the North American Travel Journalists Association for Best Travel Book) and the memoir Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Da

      13 min read

    • Article

      Here’s What I Don’t Say

      Jun 1, 2019

      Here’s What I Don’t Say
      13 min read

    • Article

      James O’Brien

      May 10, 2021

      James O’Brien
      5 min read

    • Article

      Sophie L Morgan

      Feb 6, 2023

      Sophie L Morgan
      8 min read

    • Article

      60 Seconds That Changed My Life

      Feb 5, 2023

      DATE: December 2D, 1999, 8:15pm EVENT: Writer and broadcaster BENJAMIN LAW comes out to his mum about his sexuality. I GREW UP on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, the last mainland state in Australia to decriminalise homosexuality. That meant for a

      3 min read

    • Article

      60 Seconds That Changed My Life

      Feb 5, 2023

      DATE: December 2D, 1999, 8:15pm EVENT: Writer and broadcaster BENJAMIN LAW comes out to his mum about his sexuality. I GREW UP on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, the last mainland state in Australia to decriminalise homosexuality. That meant for a

      3 min read

    • Article

      Book Extract

      Jan 20, 2020

      My year off was also interesting, in that I didn’t feel any less loved, or cherished, or wanted. Why? Because my life is already rich with soulmates, and I got the chance to behold that. You don’t have to shag someone for them to be a soulmate. We do

      7 min read

    • Article

      I Confronted My School Bullies

      Jul 3, 2019

      I Confronted My School Bullies
      6 min read

    • Article

      DEFINING Memories

      Aug 5, 2021

      DEFINING Memories
      7 min read

    • Article

      My Best Friend

      Oct 1, 2020

      My Best Friend
      6 min read

    • Article

      Alan Cumming

      Nov 1, 2021

      Alan Cumming
      5 min read

    • Article

      THE greatest LOVE

      Oct 21, 2021

      THE greatest LOVE
      10 min read

    • Article

      A Brand-new ending

      Jan 29, 2022

      A Brand-new ending
      7 min read

    • Article

      How Deep This Grief

      Aug 16, 2017

      How Deep This Grief
      9 min read

    • Article

      When Naming Isn’t Enough

      Aug 31, 2018

      When Naming Isn’t Enough
      16 min read

    • Article

      How Deep This Grief

      Aug 16, 2017

      IAN STANSEL is the author of the novel The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) and the short story collection Everybody’s Irish (FiveChapters, 2013), a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. He teac

      9 min read

    • Article

      Perfection

      Jun 9, 2020

      For years I could barely write a page. I thought I was becoming a virtuoso of smallness while the grief, which is wordless, occupied an ever-greater volume. My friend lived in the estates on the bad side of town. Let’s go to the forest, she said when

      9 min read

    • Article

      All By Myself

      Apr 28, 2020

      All By Myself
      6 min read

    • Article

      Mi querida Sanaë

      Jun 16, 2020

      Mi querida Sanaë
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Arrangements: Coming of Age with Books

      Jun 26, 2018

      1.  “How many of you still play with dolls?” Depending on our moods: We rolled our eyes; we buried our burning faces in our arms; we groaned; we shrieked; we wished to be elsewhere; we were present. In the exact middle of eighth grade (the season in

      5 min read

    • Article

      Chris Packham

      Jul 17, 2023

      Chris Packham
      5 min read

    • Article

      No Apologies: On Writing About My Mother’s Life

      Mar 15, 2021

      I am halfway through a first draft. On bad days, I long for the comforts of fiction: the anonymity, the deniability. The post No Apologies: On Writing About My Mother’s Life appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      After Prison, I Became a Better Dad

      Jun 14, 2019

      “Even when a parent has been part of a child’s pain, that parent’s love can still be the antidote.”

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Infelicitous

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Infelicitous - Michael Noctor

      Infelicitous

      By

      Michael Noctor

      Copyright. All rights reserved © 2018

      Also by Michael Noctor

      Four Wheels & a Pillow

      Tapas, Tarts & Trannies

      The Boy Within

      Me Arse

      We’ve Only Just Begun

      Anotherd@te.com

      My Little Catfish

      ‘And I ain’t afraid of dyin’ cold and alone, when my time comes.

      When I was young, I didn’t know too much, I thought that I could rule the world. Then I grew up, I found out life was hard. Harder than a stone.’

      City and Colour (Harder than stone)

      Acknowledgements:

      Cover photo courtesy of Denise Docherty

      Book title courtesy of Gary Cummins

      This book is dedicated to a wonderful woman and her wonderful son.

      CONTENTS

      Youth

      Brothers

      Acceptance

      Sunny Siberia

      Despair

      Melons

      Oral

      Begoña

      Virginity

      Radio Officer

      Ravages of time

      Ben

      Futility

      Never

      Daddy

      Hope

      Pregnant

      Screams

      No after-life

      Jack

      Loss

      Graveside

      Chat

      Que pasa?

      Hola

      Infelicitous

      1983

      1 Youth

      I remember the summer of 1983. I was sweet nineteen, as opposed to sour sixteen that had descended on my young life three years earlier. I was happy. George Bernard Shaw said that youth is wasted on the young. Even now, in my fifties, I have mixed feelings about what I at one time considered the resentful utterance of a bitter old man. I do, however, like the idea of reliving my youth with the knowledge I have acquired since that word applied to me.

      I think the most satisfying aspect of the afore mentioned sourness was how little it affected me. In future years I would look back and consider the level of heartache involved but at the time, without realising it, I was emotionally bullet-proof. Sad and bad things happened but I was rubbery, meaning they bounced off me. So, when at the tender age of sixteen my Spanish girlfriend arrived back in Dublin, having neglected to tell me she would be coming back with her new Spanish boyfriend, it was like water off a duck’s back. I did feel sad, hurt even, and I wondered why she had kept in contact without sharing what was an important piece of information. I can’t remember how long the bad feeling lasted, but it probably wasn’t for very long.

      Bernard Shaw’s comment does have its merits, otherwise his words would have disappeared into obscurity, but at least during my youth I didn’t have the tendency to allow my mind dwell on negativity. I saved that mental exercise for the future when I could become annoyed, lose sleep and want to kill every daughter and son of a bitch on the planet just because someone might say something I didn’t like, or look sideways at me. It’s probably fair to say that my young mind was in need of development, of a tad more maturity. There have been times when I wished that development and maturity had not happened. I grew older. Whether or not I grew wiser is a matter for debate.

      Most of my early year troubles involved members of the opposite sex. Like the time I met a beautiful girl in college, except it wasn’t college in the true sense of the word. The word college implies university, third level education and lectures. I was attending Rathmines Senior College. It was not a university and it was not third level. I went there to repeat the Leaving Cert; the second level examination I had failed so miserably because instead of studying I was doing other things. I was smoking dope. I liked dope and with it came the mind-numbing lethargy that prevented me from concentrating on text books. I did do something positive. I prayed. I would accompany my mother to 8 o’clock mass on Sunday evenings because she liked to listen to a Supertramp song performed by the folk group. I was not religious but seeing as I was in the church I thought it might be a good idea to bend the knee and ask God to give me a bit of a dig out with my upcoming exams. I didn’t hold God responsible when I failed, but I did call him a bollox. Back then, I thought he existed.

      I wasn’t sure. There had been a time of certainty. It was around the same time I believed a fat man came down the chimney with a bag full of toys. How simple life seemed back then. Not that there wasn’t the occasional blip. Like the time I gave God the two fingers. I can’t remember why, but I do remember feeling another certainty. I knew I was going to Hell. You see, I didn’t just make the sign with two fingers. I also said, ‘Fuck off.’ I said it out loud. It was different when I called him a bollox. I didn’t say it out loud. I just thought it.

      I passed the Leaving Cert second time around, just about. That’s a lie. I failed again but when the results were posted to my house, which only happened to repeat students, I opened the envelope, saw that I had failed for the second time, quickly thanked the bollox for at least seeing to it that my parents were on holiday, and asked my aunt who was in the house at the time to perform her artistic magic by changing the E grade I had received in Geography to a B. The forgery, which passed the inspection of my mother’s good friend and neighbour, was not good enough to fool the board of education but it was good enough for me to meet up with my classmates, go on the rip roaring celebratory piss-up and not have to suffer the embarrassment of telling them I had failed, for the second time. Some things are sweeter the second time around. Failing is not one of them and as it turned out neither was falling in love. This time the girl was Irish. Her name was Catherine. She was a plump young lady, which is a nice way of saying she was fat, but her one saving grace was her beautiful face. I would go to the library across the road from the college and find a seat where I could stare at her without her noticing.

      She was a hippy-type and the days I liked best were the days she came to class wearing one of her floral hippy dresses underneath her Parka jacket and

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1