‘Prosinecki’ by Adrian Duncan

For more Wendy, listen to her reading and analysing Adrian’s story. I feel like I’ve learned about half of what I know about stories from that (if that’s much at all). My favourite stories are mini-novels, like May-Lan’s, and like this one, where a clanky-limbed gladiator of a midfielder nearing the end of his career looks around a clanky stadium, wondering – but not for too long – what the point of his footballing life has been (hint: it is a moment of unrecorded, unrecordable, unrepeatable beauty). In the synaptic gap between his wondering and his realisation, a whole lifetime is recounted, and a whole philosophy articulated,

First published in The Stinging Fly 38:2, Summer 2018, and collected in Midfield Dynamo, Lilliputt Press, 2021. You can hear Wendy Erskine read it on The Stinging Fly podcast here