Frost Heave which was a winner in the Willesden Short Story Competition earlier this year and included in the anthology New Short Stories 6 is now available in its Kindle edition from Amazon
Here is the opening extract from the story:
Frost Heave
Night and the bitterness so much in
his mouth that Folan could taste his own liver. The moon full, full over the
stone walls, the fields, silvering all it shone on; air frost killing the hedge
around him as he sat crouched in the back of the hen house. He held his shotgun
close, cold biting into his hands until he had to squeeze them under his oxters
to keep the feeling alive in them. That morning he had come out, cats
scratching at the door for their breakfast, and found six of his hens scattered
across the dirt-floor of their coop, heads lolling to one side, the blood
sucked out of them. Killing for sport, killing just to taste death. He blew on
his hands again, his breath chilled before it ever got to them. He was tired of
things being taken from him. He hadn’t seen it coming. He hadn’t seen it at
all.
He had filled himself
with the dinner before he came out. At times like this it helped to have a full
belly, though he was beginning to get tired of the meat that stuffed his
freezer. Still, too good to be wasted. A couple of weeks earlier, out hunting,
he had come across the stag lying in the ditch. Beautiful beast. Struck by a
carload of lads coming back from the pub; left lying there. Folan had taken the
gun from his shoulder, pulled off his jacket and covered its indigo marble eye,
glassy with pain. The import of the shot rang through the woods and was muffled
by the trees as the upper body shuddered. The hind quarters, already broken,
never moved. Eyes flickered out and Folan stretched over to close them.
It was a bitch to get
the animal into the trailer but he did and drove it back, pulled it into the
yard with its powerful antlers all rutted out. He winched it up into the roof
of the barn with a pulley. Bled it, grallocked it. Threw the guts into a barrel
in the corner. The ease with which the pelt came away, the animal still warm,
like it had just slipped off its coat in an overheated room.
Ireland falling into the ice age and the
carcass froze right through to the ribs. No choice the next morning but to take
the chainsaw to it and carve it up as best he could, the meat all jag-damaged
at the edges as he piled it already frozen into the freezer. It would take him
a lifetime to eat so much flesh on his own. Now.
