Melanie is from a small town and finds a job in a big city and meets Bill, the man she wants… marry so she calls Alice, her sist… older and married, for advice.

Melanie cried for hours the day a drunk driver ran over her dog a week after she had an abortion. She loved that dog so much she told her mother she knew

An article in the paper reports something one doesn’t see happen in America very often. Eighty billionaires, millionaires and others close to that level

Every four years I vote and every four years for the last 40 years the same lady has signed me in

My parents were far from preachy. They went to church separately and I went to the children’s service

It’s never what she says always how she says it and how she stands when she says it and what she says

In 1962, I was a caseworker, not a social worker, in the Cabrini-Green Housing Project in Chicago. In that era, the difference between a caseworker and a social worker was simple. A soc...

Before dawn Bill stoops under crimson leaves of the low-hanging Japanese Maple

A row of lilacs covered with a summer snow. Ten white butterflies.\ Donal Mahoney

A mountain man is Fillmore but there are no mountains where Fillmore lives deep in a hollow. He’s never had a job

Three sisters single in their 40s gather 'round the fire on a night of thunder to figure out which sister

Where did it go? I really don’t know. I lost it weeks ago in the middle of the night. Too tired to get up.

Thirty years ago, long before ISIS started executing Kurds, Muslims and Christians, I hired a Pakistani Muslim as an art director in Chicago. I was an Irish Catholic editor putting out ...

Autumn and the leaves, crisp in the swirling air, are pheasant wings once more Donal Mahoney