The Chattahoochee Review's blog, The Hooch, has this really cute piece from contributing editor Gregg Murray about my chapbook of flash, Of Dublin and Other Fictions.
A Story Concerning Nuala Ní
Chonchúir’s Of Dublin and Other Fictions
Gregg Murray
So I’m sharing a cab with this
impecunious muzzle who says he’s a writer. Oh, and he is an impatient reader
who likes surprises, le mot juste, and the sentences of Flann O’Brien. I
like stories—who doesn’t?—but I won’t read flagellant prose to get it. I’ll
take the movie version after a sixer of the Beast if I’m just in it to find out
what happens next. Well, this guy giggles into his patchwork mittens, and we’re
getting on pretty good, until the cabbie says, “So it’s like that” and starts
quoting this jaw-dropping stuff we’ve never heard of.
“There you saw Nicholas’s lorry,
on its side, spilling a sea of fish onto the tarmac. The fish were grey and
doll-eyed and the road was completely blocked.”
“Doll-eyed.”
“I know,” he says in wonder.
“That’s the word it had to be.” And we’re just listening. They’re all prose
poems obviously, and it’s mythical in one breath and in the next it’s as real
as an insult. Anyway, he just keeps after it, describing worlds like ours but
with the blade of truth stuck in their brawny trunks. “Pikes, muskets, cannon,
horses, and men, men, men. Piled around the fields of Aughrim. Where before
there was ragwort and bog pimpernel, there was gore.”
And we’re huddled against each
other in the back, me and this guy I wouldn’t know from Adam. Now, “She is a
tree, this branch-haired woman with a trunk body and bark cloak. Birds nestle
in her hair. At laying time, Treewoman opens her bellydoor and a partridge
flies in.” He’s telling us about this “Treedaughter” in a micro-poetry
bildungsroman, replete with moral, and then he steers into the Café de la Gare
and is suddenly assuming the persona of Vincent van Gogh with a razor-blade.
And then it’s “Jesus of Dublin” and “egglore” and fog making water “drip like
tears from the trees.” Amazing.
Well, long story short. The
cabbie’s getting all worked up and in a trance and crashes the cab, and so we
all three die and our fishdead bodies in the streetlit road have this
phosphorescent sheen on them like we’re in the Bible or something.
*all text inside quotation are
from Nuala Ní Chonchúir’s Of Dublin and Other Fictions
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