The Sunday Scaries
Volume 1, Number 15
Microfiction by Pat Harrigan
Content Warning: Language and Horror
Garryowen
Garryowen was a terror. By day he worked as a foreman in the leatherworks, and no one denied he worked as hard as any man. And he worked his men hard too, and they hated him, but they still stood him drinks on Friday and Saturday nights. It didn’t always protect them from his fists, but maybe it encouraged him to batter them a little more lightly. And after the pubs closed he was great fun, it had to be said, taking us down the street to Mistress Shan’s, breaking the streetlamps with his well-aimed stones, pounding dents in the mistress’s door and showing that foreign lad who worked there what was meant in Limerick by keeping the peace. The girls would sob.
He was never found at mass on Sundays. He had no wife or children. His people, it was said, had come from Galway, though no one knew them. On Sundays he went poaching on the landlord’s estate: coneys mostly, but he was once seen carrying a good-sized buck over his shoulders, and he was seen eating dried jerky in the pub for months after.
They hanged him eventually, for the rabbits, but he broke apart two of the soldiers who arrested him so badly that they died before he did. I wish we could hang the man three times, said Major Wilcocks. We all attended the hanging, it was a grand old day. Some of the boys got weepy—ah we’ll never see his like again—but that was cactha and I told them so. We were better off without the brute and I was old enough by then to know we would certainly see his like again. Me, I raised a pint to the rabbits.
Now after a time they said he came back, a spectre of a man, doing these fine big ghostly things, but I’ve never seen him. I’ve haunted this pub for two hundred years now, and I would know. No man nor woman in Limerick ever named him a friend, nor would’ve ever invited him back to the land of breath, and if you ask me that old boy has been poaching on his sulfurous father’s estate since the day he died.
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