Prose Daragh Fleming

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: DARAGH FLEMING

Daragh Fleming is an author from Cork, Ireland. He currently has two collections of short stories published by Riversong Books as well as work appearing in several literary magazines including The Ogham Stone and Époque Magazine. Fleming won the Cork Arts ‘From The Well’ Short Story Competition in 2021. His debut in nonfiction, Lonely Boy is due for release in November with BookHub Publishing. Daragh is also the Faberlull writer-in-residence for October 2022 in Olot, Spain.

The Empty Man

Feverish is the house which sits quietly on the end of the road next to a cornfield. A single

occupant now, although this has not always been the case. There is a stillness. Not the

comforting kind. A stillness like death. The old wooden benches in the front garden rot slowly,

red paint chipping like pastry. The grass knee high and wet. The boundary wall gasping for a lick

of fresh paint, too.

Mornings when he can’t seem to get himself out of bed come more frequently now. The sunlight

taunts him through cracked curtains, stabbing at eyes that are unwilling to open. No alarm

clocks ever ring out. There’s always the sourness of sleep in his mouth. Limbs are stiff and his brain rattles with the darkness of the night. Excerpts of dreams flee from recall. The dog paces

in the living room waiting for his rise. She’s the only reason he eventually gets up. When he was many years younger he used to get up early and go for runs to the beach. Life

found his legs. The sun would bleat down and he’d glide across tarmac. At the beach then he’d swim around in the cold saltwater before running home. He hasn’t done any of that in years now

though, and can’t remember ever being the type of person that would. And yet he’s not old enough yet to be longing for his youth.

The central heating is ancient in the house. Only half of the rooms ever really have heat. The

radiators creak and moan as the hot water seeps through the pipes. The house is never as warm

as he’d want it to be, but now his bones are used to the numbness.

There are weeds coming up through the patio in the back garden. They appear malicious, all

green and angry. The bird feeders are empty, always. He can’t remember the last time he spoke aloud to something that wasn’t a dog. In the mirror he spots himself. The mirrors eyes meet his

own without compassion. Greasy hair in need of washing and a face that suggests there was no

sleeping done at all.

On the rare morning that he feels somewhat motivated he starts doing push-ups as soon as he

brushes his teeth. He can feel his outgrown stomach kissing the floor and this makes him feel

even worse. He stops with the push-ups after something like ten.

People used to say he was handsome. Briefly. He was liked. There was like a three year period of

being sexually viable and then he piled on the weight as he began to drink more heavily and his

face kind of began to cave in on itself and that was that. His looks withdrew from him as he

withdrew from the world.

On Wednesdays he gets drunk alone. Out in the back garden regardless of weather and only in

the afternoon. In wintertime this means drinking cans of cider quickly in the pouring rain. He’ll lean against the house with his hood drawn up, listening to the soft raining stepping around

him. In the summer months it’s a less grim affair. He sits on one of the abandoned outdoor chairs and drinks cans of beer or bottles of wine and listens to grainy music from his phone

while throwing a ball for the dog. She doesn’t ever seem to mind what weather they have. There are four bedrooms in the house. Three upstairs and one downstairs. He rarely goes

upstairs at all. He sleeps downstairs in a room that used to belong to someone else. There’s a fireplace in the room which still works. It’s an old house. Often he lights it and falls asleep by the

fire imagining that he was in a cave that existed long before he had to.

As a child he was terrified of the dark. He used to imagine hands reaching for him from under

beds. Some nights he wouldn’t sleep at all. Now he feels most comfortable in the dark. Funny how that often goes.

On Thursday mornings he visits the mother. Hungover and by purpose. Her grave is a 25 minute

walk from the house and he brings the dog with him for company. He never puts her on a lead,

a

fact which frustrates many of the surrounding neighbours but no one ever mentions it directly.

When he visits her, he brings a small camping stool to sit on. He can’t remember whether he was

sad when she passed.

There was never a wife. There was never even someone close to a wife. His hidden worldly

misery eventually sprung up in such ways to scare lovers away. The low hum of despair

radiated from him, despite his best efforts. When he thinks about this he isn’t sure if it makes him sad but sometimes tears do fall quietly in the dark.

The dog died as dogs do. He buried her in the back garden next to the tulips in the wild grass.

It wasn’t a Wednesday then but he drank anyway, out there in the garden. He threw the ball and it just landed uneventfully in the long grass. The loneliness seeped in with the mist. There were

no tears shed but they were felt. He didn’t get another dog after her. When the better weather came and the fruits ripened you’d often see him out on the country roads picking blackberries for jams. The neck would be bright red and the back of his t-shirt

darkened with summer sweat. He’d stay out there right until dusk filling bowls and buckets with the bitter berries.

There was mould all over the ceiling of the only bathroom in the house. It was built before

ensuite toilets came into fashion. The mould was black and presented in tiny circles which made

him feel sick if he stared up at it for too long. Which he often did as he stood to attention for a

piss, and on several occasions ended up getting sick into the toilet mid-stream.

He began drinking on Fridays as well as Wednesdays after the dog died.

Now he rarely speaks out loud. There is no need to. There are no dogs to call in out of the rain.

He watches late night TV in the dark alone and rarely wonders about anything in particular. The

past is locked from him by design. He just sits and eats and gets ready for bed and sleeps, over

and over again. The days whirl together like some drumline march to the end. When he thinks of

death he feels nothing.

Once a month he meets some old friends in a pub in town. Not on a Wednesday but he makes

exceptions. These meet ups usually take place on Saturdays when there’s some sort of match on so they can all stare up communally at a TV rather than sit in awkward silence and converse

face to face. He smiles and is careful only to drink as many pints as his old friends. When they

ask how he’s getting on he lies. They talk of families and careers and he sits and continues to

smile and listen while the void inside of him grows quietly bigger.

The shower in the bathroom is so old that you can’t hear the radio when it’s turned on. An electric droning hum fills the entire house the way some smells do. It can’t keep the temperature of the water very well. Sometime he turns it on just to scream aloud in peace.

He never moved out of home except for college. When his father died, long before his mother, he

stayed to look after her. She’d never asked him to. He knows he could have left the way the

sister did. It was easier not to. It was easier to use his father’s passing as an excuse to stop living himself.

Before there’d be days when life felt more full. Before they all went away – the dogs and the

parents and the rest. There was hope laced in terrific sunshine across the cornfields. There were

people who were happy to see him and who called often. He doesn’t know why it all changed. His back is always sore. It has been for some years. He wakes each morning with a sore jaw, and

there’s always the whisper of a headache in his skull. There used to be silver in his pockets but now all he can feel is the emptiness.

(Daragh Fleming)