Fiona McKay

‘Cars these days don’t have a spare,’ the man says.

Kate, looking in the boot of the car, is startled, her heart a flock of sparrows. The empty country road, her flat tyre. Where had he even come from? A field? Beside her, behind a screen of trees, wheat grows to the horizon. A puckered bright green hill untouched in the centre.

‘What they give you now is a tube of puncture repair stuff,’ he continues.

Kate, conscious of how close he is, how he’s breaching the unwritten boundary.

‘We paid extra for a spare,’ Kate says, flustered into a response he’s not owed, this stranger. ‘My husband felt – my husband then, not now – it would be safer.’ Why is she giving him this information? She lifts carpeting and there it is, the narrow tyre, the jack she’s never used, shiny like a toy.

‘Let me,’ he says, stretches past her. 

He is fast and slick with the tools. Smaller and wirier than he first appeared, he bounces on the wrench to loosen the bolts; he slots the jack into a niche, shows her – ‘If you don’t get it just right, you’ll put the jack straight through the chassis.’

Kate nods and smiles, feeling helpless, foolish. 

‘I was a mechanic in the army,’ he says. ‘Peacekeeping. Lebanon.’ He has the old tyre off, propped against the car. Kate sees the flat patch – hears again in her head the slapping sound it had made. ‘Lucky to be out of it these last few years.’

Kate tries to find something to say, mouth full of silence now.

‘Unit I used to be with was fired on, there recently. You might have seen it on the news?’ he says.

‘I did,’ Kate says. 

‘The world is gone crazy,’ he says. ‘Did you see what they’re after doing down in Ringsend?’ 

Kate has seen the news; people stirred to hatred by fear of the unknown. The dog-whistle phrases – unvetted males, undocumented, single – the angry protestors, the flags, the flags, the flags. Her fingers touch her phone. 

‘Set a place on fire that was to be for asylum seekers,’ he says. Kate flinches as he reaches into his own pocket. He pulls out a small book – thin pages, gold rubbed bare on the ancient cover. ‘We worked close with the locals when I was over there. Good lads. One of them gave me this Koran. I can’t read the Arabic, but it was nice of him, you know? We’re all the same under the skin.’ He tightens up the bolts on the spare, lifts the heavy tyre into the boot. ‘You’re all done, missus.’

Kate palms a twenty into his hand, ‘You saved me, thank you, let me buy you a coffee.’

‘You’re very good,’ he says.

Kate closes the boot on the damaged tyre, looks up, and he’s gone. She turns a circle, sees nothing but the road stretching away, and the gold of the wheat, the bright green of the tumulus.

Fiona’s prompts were: In/At a Broken Down Car, a Soldier, an Old Book

Fiona McKay is the author of the novellas-in-flash, The Lives of the Dead, Ad Hoc Fiction (2025), The Top Road, Ad Hoc Fiction (2023), and the flash fiction collection Drawn and Quartered, Alien Buddha Press (2023). She was a SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow in 2023. Her flash fiction is in Bath Flash, Gone Lawn, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, The Forge, Variant Lit, Ghost Parachute, trampset, Bending Genres, Fractured Lit, Peatsmoke and others. Her work is included in Best Small Fictions 2024. She lives in Dublin, Ireland. She is on X (formerly Twitter) @fionaemckayryan and Bluesky @fionamckay.bsky.social