WATCHING THE DETECTIVES

KOJAK

Hello, Detective, where are you going?

Call me Theo

Theo, that’s a nice name

Yes it is

Is that your lollypop?

Yes it is

It looks sweet

Yes it is

I want you

Yes you do

I love you

Yes you do

You’re so direct

Yes I am

Tell me something to break my heart

Who loves ya, baby?

Ohhhhhh, Theo!

When a picture paints a thousand words, then why can’t I paint you?

You really do it to me

Yes I do

You’re the main man

Yes I am

Ohhhhhh, Kojak, you’ve done me again!

Yes I have

13 Kojak

 

QUINCY

QUINCY

‘I swear I saw it, I did, I did,’ says the lippy horseman pointing back towards the island.

‘You saw what, may I ask?’ asks the armless one.

‘Fungus Face, Mister Mask the Fungus Face! He made some bad ju ju down there.’

‘Do do?’

‘Ju Ju! He do an autopsy or something on someone or something, I don’t know what. Couldn’t make it out.’

‘You should go back and make it out,’ says the armless one.

‘Come on! Who do you think I am, Poirot or Quincy?’ asks the horseman

‘Quincy.’

‘And who do you think he is?’

‘Quincy.’

‘Well, I’m not going back, not for you, not for no one, not even for Quincy.’

 

POLICE! CAMERA! ACTION!

creep

 

Police! Camera! Action!

Another disaster programme done and dusted, and the TV anchor-man made from slime and Milk Tray slips away to the park. Clothes off, neck hair swept back, his metamorphosis into a creeping creeper creep happens within his own moving fog of smug. His form glides as much as it hunches and when he arrives in the park he sets about worrying the deer by whispering crime statistics and the phrase ‘buckled Austin Princess’ into their hot felt like ears. ‘Bastards’ is a word he savours for unsettling the stags, their bony coat stands tensing as if they might rut and cut at any moment. But as quick as he was there, he’s gone again. Back to the studios and into his early evening television suit, a Chaplin dung stain mopped off his top lip by his adoring assistant, his tiny hooves clasping the calf insoles of his smart heeled shoes.

Smile! Smarm! Action!

 

 

*Pictures by Jonny Voss

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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
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