Pat Reads Our Stories

Short fiction.

Image via Wikimedia

I show Pat your short story on the bus to Killarney. I’m not about that sort of thing, he says. Then he opens Facebook on his phone and plays a video in which a couple reviews fast food in their car. Pat gulps down two of these videos and turns back to me. Squints at your story. Give it here, he says. Seizes my phone and pinches the screen to increase the text size. Like he’s trying to pluck out a splinter. Then Pat nudges the kind-eyed, red-cheeked woman beside him. Read this fookin’ thing, he says. He raises my phone to her face and, thumbing the phone in his other hand, starts a call. Hello lady! he shouts. An incomprehensible brough gurgles out of the speaker. Yes, yes, replies Pat. Tuesdee. No, tree, tree-tirty. He ends the call. Then Pat slides my phone into the small pouch on the back of the seat in front of him and tugs off his shirt. Flips it inside-out. His mother takes my phone from the pouch and smiles at me. Pat reaches for the ceiling and wiggles his fingers. Sweat berries the hair on his back. He picks his teeth and then pulls the shirt back on. Are ya done? he asks his mother. I don’t understand this, love, she tells me. I can tell she’s trying. Pat grabs my phone and reads aloud the breakup email I received two days before I arrived in Ireland, the one in which my ex said there were too many things to say but nobody taught her how to write an ending. What the fook are ya doin’, Ma, that’s not the story, he says. I want to tell him it’s a story alright but instead I gently take my phone from his hand and re-open the document you sent me. It’s a good story. One that people should know. I’m in the strange green land of my blood and I want to understand how people here feel, so I show Pat your story again. His face puckers like a tickled asshole. Not another one, he says. Then the bus lurches forward and we jump across the next hamlet near the coast.