‘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

‘Prosinečki’ by Adrian Duncan

‘Prosinečki’ takes place in a lower-league football stadium somewhere in Northern England and its narrative duration is very short: it begins during a break in play while one of the narrator’s teammates lies “splayed on the ground amid plumes of vapour and hunkering medics” and ends minutes later, when play has resumed, and the narrator has dinked a cross for his striker to head into the net. Really, though, the story takes place in that expansive non-time which is the domain of great writers and footballers alike, and which its writing perfectly evokes:

I was on the midway line, with my back to goal, and as the ball sped to me through the sleet I feigned right and clipped the ball with the inside of my foot, back across my body and past my left knee. Then, feeling the entire earth rushing over my right shoulder, I span left, and the pitch, the stadium, the lights, the forest cleaved open before me.

The story never makes the analogy explicit – part of what makes it so good is that it speaks only in the language of football – but you can also read ‘Prosinečki’ as a reflection on the development of a writer, who like a footballer, endures years of pain and rejection in pursuit of the brief, transcendent moments when it all comes together.

First published in The Stinging Fly in summer, 2018 and collected in Midfield Dynamo, The Lilliput Press, 2021. Stinging Fly subscribers can read the story here. Non-subscribers can also listen to a great reading by Wendy Erskine here

‘We Too Have Wind-blown Plazas’ by Adrian Duncan

I knew I had to buy Midfield Dynamo when I saw the contents page was laid out in the formation of a football team, with each story occupying its own position on the field. ‘We Too Have Wind-Blown Plazas’ is the No 9, one of two strikers, the target man. Foster is an engineer working in Abu Dhabi, who has left Ireland as much to escape the scorn of his father as the country to which he promised himself he would never return. He wants to “perish in the desert”, isolating himself in his work, but he comes under the influence of his employer, another father figure, who introduces him to class A drugs and seems determined to lead him into complete dissolution. His sense of reality becomes increasingly disordered and when he witnesses the grotesque death of a migrant worker it’s never clear if it’s an actual event, a drug-induced hallucination, or purely a metaphor. This is a short and shocking story of alienation and loss of self, flatly and precisely told. It starts with Foster’s rage at his father and ends in his deportation back to Ireland and its “people and their rage, or something that sounds like rage, but rage that has been continuously doused and beaten and broken, until it is barely rage at all.” There’s not much in the way of hope here, even less than in Ó Ceallaigh’s ‘Dead Dog’, but it’s a fascinating and compelling piece of writing.

Collected in Midfield Dynamo, The Lilliput Press, 2021

‘Prosinecki’ by Adrian Duncan

This story is about a journeyman footballer and the shocking potential for violence and beauty in his line of work. It leaves you with a crystal-clear sense of what it is like to do a job in front of baying crowds, the ideals and principles at football’s rarest heights, and the magical way Duncan describes manipulating the spaces of a football pitch.

Listen to Wendy Erskine’s amazing reading of it (on The Stinging Fly podcast here).

First published in The Stinging Fly 38:2, Summer 2018, and collected in Midfield Dynamo, Lilliputt Press 2021