GOAT KILLS SNAKE
Pablo the goat came over all Diablo when a slimy snake slithered under his hoof.
‘Cotton-picking son of a slitherer!’ yelled Pablo, who up until now had never uttered a word in his life.
‘Rattle’ rattled the snake.
‘Enough of that,’ yelled Pablo as he brought his hoof down on the rattling snake’s rattling spine. ‘And take that too,’ he yelled again, bringing his other hoof down to silence the rattler for good and for bad.
The desert fell silent. The moon glowered like a shiny spoon and Pablo began to eat the snake.
‘What’s come over me,’ he thought. ‘I’m normally a peace loving chap and I’ve always been an herbivore.’
The desert stayed quiet and offered no reply but a ball of dry prairie grass rolled by until Pablo ate that too.
picture by Jonny Voss
About Alan McCormick Writing
Alan McCormick lives with his family in Wicklow. He’s a Trustee and former writer in residence for InterAct Stroke Support, a charity employing actors to read fiction and poetry to stroke patients.
His writing has won prizes and been widely performed and published, including recently in The Stinging Fly, Banshee, The Lonely Crowd, Southword, Sonder and Exacting Clam magazines, and previously in Salt’s Best British Short Stories, A Wild and Precious Life – A Recovery Anthology, Modern Nature Anthology – Responses to Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, The Poetry Bus, The Sunday Express Magazine, The Bridport and Fish Prize Anthologies, Popshot, Litro and Confingo; and online at Epoque Press, Words for the Wild, 3:AM Magazine, Culture Matters, Dead Drunk Dublin, Mono, Fictive Dream, The Quietus and Found Polaroids.
His story ‘Firestarter’ came second in the 2022 Francis MacManus RTE Short Story Competition and ‘Boys on Film’ came second in The 2023 Plaza Prizes Sudden Fiction competition.
DOGSBODIES and SCUMSTERS , his collection of short stories with flash shorts inspired by Jonny Voss’s pictures, was published by Roast Books and long-listed for the Edge Hill Prize.
Alan and Jonny also collaborate on illustrated shorts known as Scumsters – see more at Deaddrunkdublin.com and Scumsters.blogspot
Alan McCormick Writing 