Not much happens in “The Sisters,” the first story in James Joyce’s Dubliners. Some of the meaning in the story comes from descriptions of the light in and around the house where the town’s old priest, Father Flynn’s body lies. Other meanings come through the characters’ memories of the priest, expressed through incomplete dialog and longer reveries by the narrator. Additional meanings can be surmised from the vocabulary, some of the specific words Joyce uses in the story, “like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism.”