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Friday night. The hurling season was already well in swing, but a reappearance of the wine and a flash of garter belt was enough to put the match from his mind quick enough.
He daren’t ask of the results of the passion when the wine appeared the next week too, only figured, when he walked in and saw the glasses on the table, that he’d count his blessings while they lasted. He counted them, gave thanks with them indeed, all the way to
July and their arrival, once more, back to the town surgery, and the same, leathery face, the same stripe of grey down the middle of the scanner woman’s roots.
“You might, want to have a look at this, girleen,” the
woman said, a hint of the country tearing through her Cork city modulations. She patted Marie’s hand excitedly where she held it clenched against the low- ered band of her skirt. A flash of light emerged from the scanner’s darkness, flickered and then appeared again, a pulse within her, small and flashing with potential.
Herbert was awarded his PhD in Modern Fiction from Birmingham University and has since graduated from New Writing South’s Creative Writing Programme and Advanced Writers’ Workshop. His fiction has been published in The Forge Literary Magazine, Words for the Wild, DNA Magazine, Porridge and The Nottingham Review among others. He teaches and writes in Brighton, UK and Co. Cork, Ireland.
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