Robert Flanagan

"What a terrific group of stories...drama in the very best sense...all of it activated by clean, tight, powerful prose...a jewel that will be shining for years to come." -- Tim O'Brien

"Robert Flanagan's bittersweet stories chronicling the charges and retreats in the ongoing skirmish between men and women are convincing, moving, and above all recognizable." -- Shelby Hearon

CONTENTS:
Naked to Naked Goes
Berzerk
Teller’s Ticket
Smoker
Local Anaesthetic
Close Dancing
Comedy of Eros
Gaming
Father’s Day 173

Where did the book's title come from?
From "A Last Confession" by W. B. Yeats, one of his Crazy Jane poems, which reads in part:

"I gave what other women gave
That stepped out of their clothes,
But when the soul, its body off,
Naked to naked goes,
He it has found shall find therein
What none other knows."

* * * * * * * * * * *

THE OPENING OF THE STORY
"CLOSE DANCING"

Word came down from Sister Mary Annunication, their eighth grade teacher and principal of Saint Sebastian's. As usual, it had to do with trouble and Doolin.

Doolin and some guys were rambling through alleys heading home from hardball in the field behind the old Toledo paper Box factory. Osmanski and Kleinschmidt were playing catch. Tony Pavoni shouldered a Louisville slugger.

Doolin had broken off a limb from a stinkweed tree, Tree of Heaven his sister called it, and stripped it of branches, to use as a walking stick. As a kid, playing Robin Hood or Geronimo, he'd made bows and arrows from stinkweed trees.

The mid-May afternoon sky was robin's-egg blue. In two weeks June would free Doolin for good from the gray stone fort of Saint Sebastian's. He would spend the summer working on his uncle's farm in Michigan. Come September, he'd start high school at Eli Whitney or Christ the King; he hadn't yet made up his mind.

Eddie Reardon, Annie's younger brother, a yo-yo who glued bb's to cherry bombs and winged them at cats, came running up. "She gave'em hell! She's gonna take 'em to Father Speer! You're really gonna get it, Doolin!"