"Fire Starter" - A Short Story by Alan McCormick - 2022 - An Irish Short Story Month XIII Work

Irish Short Story Month XIII 

"Fire Starter" is the first story by the highly awarded Wiclow resident Alan McCormick to be featured in The Reading Life.  Going forward I hope to delve deeply into his work.

"Fire Starter" is set in an asylum of some sort, the exact location and nature of it are a  bit cloked in shadows. Conventional religion is employed as part of the therapy"

"Theo thinks he’s Christ.  At my first attempt to eat breakfast in the retreat’s communal dining room, he’s shouting:

‘I can save some of you but I won’t be able to save all of you!’

‘That’s fine, Theo, do whatever you can,’ Simon the warden replies, pulling him away

Later, as I try to eat, I hear sobbing coming from the lounge.

Simon’s head appears around the doorway: ‘Theo has had an unfortunate accident, kids,’ he says, ‘and won’t be staying with us for a while.’

Simon’s wife, Ursula, wears tight purple leggings that smell of citrus and sandalwood. She looks young for fifty, and speaks as if she’s a WW2 German spy expertly repeating dated bookish English, a Teutonic phrase occasionally intervening between exacting vowels and corrective grammar. She is also a healer.

I lie on my bed, eyes closed, head propped on a mound of pillows as she kneels beside me, lightly stroking my left temple, my face turned into the soapy incense of her legs, soothing purples filling my eyelids.

‘Breathe in the calm beautiful energy of God’s nature. God loves you if you are good, and he loves you even more if you are bad. God loves you and so does everyone else.’

‘Even Theo?’

‘Especially, this Theo,’ she replies."

The narrator is a patient, inmate  at the asylum.  There is a very powerful description of a therapy session.

I do not want to spoil the plot for first time readers but I do wish to share a bit more the amazing prose of McCormick.

"Tall red spikes of light jag above a bush behind them, and Theo arrives on the lawn swinging a flaming stick above his head. He runs past Saskia who dances unsteadily around an upturned wheelchair. Sparks scatter, the crackling sound of scorched wood; the pungent smell of sulphur as he gets near to us. Ruth walks purposefully from the house to stand in his way, licks from the stick’s flame reflected in her eyes. She holds out her arms to welcome him. Theo stops and prods the stick toward her, flickers of fire falling to the ground and dying by her feet. She stays still, her arms held open, and smiles. Theo drops the stick and walks slowly into her embrace. She holds him, and then frees one arm to invite me in too."

You can read "Fire Starter" and other stories on author's website 

https://alanmccormickwriting.com/

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, 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 Bridport and Fish Prize Anthologies, Popshot, Litro and Confingo.

Work has appeared online at Epoque Press, Words for the Wild, 3:AM Magazine, Dead Drunk Dublin, Trasna, Mono, The Quietus, Fictive Dream, The Willesden Herald 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. Stories in the past have won the Ruth Rendell InterAct Stroke Support Story Competition, The Liverpool International Short Story Competition and the Middlesex Literary Festival Story Prize.

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 and Scumsters.blogspot