Each week we feature a story written by one or two of our group members at one of our meetings. Today's featured story involves a prompt taken from the chapter titles of an antique book detailing one man's travels from England to Egypt and back again. We had 20 minutes to write.
Slathebeg and Its Dark Doings
By Bryan Mahoney
If you ever find yourself in the tiny town of Slathbeg near the alpaca farm in County Tyrone, and you're overcome with peckishness from a hard day's travel from the bustling schoolyards of Cork to the more metropolitan fair of a Sligo or Donegal, you might want to pop by the pub by the river where the old witch's dolman used to be.
There you might find a fiddler wailing away or an errant spirit wandering out of the bog as easily as you'd find a plate of potatoes and a bowl of butter.
You might strike a conversation with the old man on the old stool; that's Barney Brady and the seat next to him is taken, always taken, for even if it seems empty at the moment it'll soon be occupied by Henry, Barney Brady's goose.
He's got a particular taste for broth and they'll set out a bowl for him, and a goose sipping from crockery may still not be the most unusual thing to see in Slathbeg when the wind's just right and the moon peeks out and Slathbeg's dead decide to cause a ruckus in the deep thick grasses of the bogs.
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