Forensic Songs
Mike McCormack
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 1616954140
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In his second collection of short stories, Mike McCormack joins head and heart in a series of tales which weave a fluid vision of a world morphing between the real and the hyperreal.
Amid much hollow laughter a prisoner is drawn from his cell in the middle of the night to play a video game; two rural guards ponder the security threat posed by the only man in Ireland not to have written his memoirs; a child tries to offset his destiny as a serial killer by petitioning his father for a beating; a late night American cop show becomes a savage analysis of a faltering marriage in the west of Ireland; two men turn up at the door of a slacker to give him news of his death and recruit him to some mysterious surveillance mission; an older brother worries about the health of his younger sibling; the prodigal son returns to reveal the fear and hypocrisy which lies at the heart of his brothers life.
In twelve stories McCormack’s characters find themselves trying to hold onto their identities in a world where love is too often and too easily obscured.
favour by just drawing breath. I saw then what you’d done—you’d followed me to London so you could be close to the one person in the world who’d make you look good. I saw how you’d passed off your own cowardice as brotherly love. How did you manage that, Sean, how hard did you have to work to sell that lie to yourself?” “Fuck you, Jimmy, you’re going to tell me now that all this is for my own good.” “That’s exactly what I’m telling you. I’m your older brother, that’s what we do. But first of
bottles of wine; I knew also that in the kitchen to my back there was an unopened bottle of Powers. Nevertheless, I shook my head. “Davey, there isn’t a drop here. You know herself, she doesn’t like having it in the house.” “Wine, beer, anything,” he persisted. I shook my head, desperately wishing him gone and ashamed of my pathetic lies. “Davey, I’m telling you there isn’t a drop in the house, no bottles or cans, nothing.” And there we stood, the two of us locked into this moment of knowing
motioned toward the sofa under the window where I might get a better look at my two visitors, these two sudden men. They came as a pair—this much was immediately evident. Both wore suits and were clean-shaven and I guessed there was about ten years between them; the older one, the heavier one who had given me the bad news in the hall, I judged to be around my own age; his partner, I put in his late twenties. Both appeared to have mastered the paradox of establishing a solid, physical presence
you on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh?” “The twenty-seventh was what, Sunday, Monday?” “Sunday.” “If it was Sunday I was playing football.” “You have witnesses?” “Yes, how many do you need?” His rigid stance is his way of telling her that her work in this room is finished. • • • He raises his hand before she can speak. It’s not his way to cut across his wife like this but he has an anxious need that he does not rightly understand; a need to establish something. “Okay,” he says with
see her so frustrated but he is surprised that her disappointment is never tempered by the recurrence of such things. She has been critical of this series in the recent past, despairing of how it has fallen away from the character-driven plots of the early episodes. She has prophesied that it will not run for another season and yet still she is disappointed with it. And her sulk is genuine, a sullen mire with nothing girlish or alluring to it; a relentless hum of anger comes off her. He shifts