Tuesday Night at The Shop and Shoot
Published in Chagrin River Review; anthologized in
Lock & Load: Armed Fiction, New Mexico Press.
Michael Rooney
Appeared in Image: A Journal of Art and Religion; named one of the 100 Notable Stories of the Year by Best American Stories 2000.
Phlebotomist’s Day
Two Hawks Quarterly, Spring 2018
from an interview in Lock & Load
“It came to me, in an ironic way, that America’s favorite activities are shopping and shooting.”
from “Something Grand,” Adelaide Magazine, April 2019
At 10:00, with more light filtering into the school than had at the 7 a.m. Mass, the fluorescent lights on the shellacked yellow brick of the walls smacked Mary with the ungodliness of the place. This was not what Mike would have wanted. He would have wanted the dignity, the solemnity, the parade of an aisle in a church. Aileen was right. It wasn’t the parish he loved so much, but the church itself, and for him the church was not in the people, as Father Ahearn had instructed at Mass the morning after the fire; it was in the altar, the pews, the aisle. She knew this now with a sickening certainty. Passing the office where the phone rang, and the custodian lounged, Mary, for Aileen’s sake, pretended not to be bothered. A child, out of her classroom, cried at the sight of the coffin, and Mary realized, in horror, that school was in session.
