She moved through the fair with the song in her head but she felt nothing like that sunlit beauty and no one could at this fair. Puck Fair 2023.
It was too hot for the goat to stay atop his scaffold pillar and preside over the revelry below in 2022, so this year the committee ran a contest for a human replacement. Three humans to do the work of one goat; the third prize winner would sit atop the pillar from 10:00 AM till 1:00 PM, the second from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM and first place got the 4:00 PM till 7:00 PM shift. She'd been on the committee that came up with this genius idea and voted against it. The only other woman on the committee, Ethel O’Dwyer, was enthusiastically for it. She was enthusiastically for any position Raymond O'Donoghue adopted, in or out of committee, on account of he was a cousin to the county's T.D. Realy-Hay and could get her broadband, a new road, a new sewer… next she'd be asking for Gaeltacht status for her bloody Reek, then the place would have access to every grant going.
Ethel’s sons were cute hoors too, no chance of them making fools of themselves attempting to be a goat for three days. But her own son…. not even having to get his hair cut, like the goats did, put him off. It didn't bear thinking about. Though it was hard not to, knowing he was up there now smirking down at her and the whole fair thinking that gave them the right to squeeze her shoulder and say ‘Gas man,’ ‘Great sport.’ One even had the audacity to say, ‘Chip off the ould block.’ He was anything but, unless the fella meant his long-gone father. She wouldn't mind at all if Johnny did a runner too, especially after this. He'd been such a cute baby. But that was the trouble. She’d doted on him too much, indulged his every whim, paid money she didn't have for all his arty farty classes; he didn't stick with one of them.
A roar from the crowd and all heads turned to look up. He was dancing away - stomping and jumping, more like it - on top of the pole and now the whole crowd was jumping with him. The roughest surged towards the barricade around the pillar, shoving and pushing. She’d said they should get those concrete filled yokes they put around the outdoor dining in the COVID. But oh no, too expensive they said, though Ethel had murmured ‘good idea’ before Raymond vetoed it, no doubt thinking she could stick them outside her tax dodge of a café afterwards to make it look as if visitors really did eat there.
The two Bean Gardai who'd been standing back in the doorway of a boarded-up shop came forward now, weighing up whether to sidle off on a break or wade in. Catching her glare decided them. “Would you get the DJ to turn the music off Mrs. Lenahan?” one said. She felt like she was in one of Johnny’s Hieronymus Bosch paintings, skirting skirmishes and trying not to step on body parts of the already comatose as she navigated the five yards to the DJ. He declined to stop the music despite the bottles sailing over the heads of the crowd, which looked like an Aran cable of jumping and punching. She literally pulled the plug from his rig, but the thumping and roaring went on a bit longer, enough for the Bean Gardai to feel the need to cosh all around them. The pillar started to wobble with the crowd surging into it.
“Get down you amadán, you useless, good-for-nothing feckin’ eejit! I rue the day you were born! You are a gobshite even as a goat!” she roared, not that he could hear her. He just stood there like Daniel O'Connell, fist in the air.
In under two minutes she was all over Twitter, and the video was on the RTE News that night. ‘The State of Mammyhood Today’ was the headline in the Examiner. She was gratified to see a handful of mammies commenting she had every right, they would have done the same, but most commented that it was her ilk that were driving the youth to drugs – ha! - sapping their confidence and giving them all kinds of complexes.
There was no more shoulder squeezing, she was given a wide berth. ‘Single-handedly brought disgrace to Kerry,’ she heard, though there wasn’t one in the county that hadn’t said exactly the same words to their sons and daughters, and for far less. She resigned from the committee rather than give Raymond the joy of telling her to go. Ethel’s café was finally on the map – dark tourism, it was called. Meanwhile, on the strength of the cheekbones revealed by his goat’s haircut, and his new fame airing his mother’s dirty laundry on moronic talk shows, Johnny got a modelling assignment in Dublin and stayed there. It really was an ill wind that blew no good.
About the author
Sharon Keely looks first for the used bookstores in every new place she visits, and immediately feels at home if she spots an Irish or U.K. writer's work on the shelf. Some day she hopes to see her own there. @sharonkeely.bsky.social
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