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Sweetman PodcastSimon Sweetman talks to musicians, writers, actor Author: Simon Sweetman
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Audio Recording - Short Story: Snag
Tuesday, 13 January, 2026
Snag is a nasty wee story that includes violence and discussion of sexual assault. It’s flippant, provocative, and probably downright brutal. But that’s up to each individual to decide. So if you think you’re better off skipping this story — then you should. I’ve supplied a text for it below, and the audio recording is up above. You can read it, or read along with the the recording, or just listen. You can, as I said above, just skip it all entirely. Your choice. Despite the fact that the Best Man said one word far too many times in his speech, it had been a good wedding. ‘Notwithstanding.’ You were glad to have been there. However, it really did bug you all the same. This word. It wasn’t even quite being used correctly. And Christine in her black dress staring a dagger right at you while you winced through that speech was an obvious sign there was more to come. At the end of the night, drunk, she would not be standing. That was partly her own fault, and maybe you had something to do with it too. She tried some sort of ornery lap dance, some sort of ‘getting even’ shtick for some imagined slight. She slid across your knee, the dress like wetted wax paper, and then this grotesque lick of your face, from the bottom of your chin up to the corner of your left eye in a cartoon exaggeration of slow crawl. Well, you just took the two hands you had and pushed her onto the floor where she sat like a bag of spuds. And your wife Olivia, appalled, would later describe the situation as barbaric for all — those watching, those in it, and even those that would go on to hear about it. But your wife also thought Black Dress was almost asking for it, said the whole look of her was like a sausage trying to slip its casing, or was it a sausage unaware it was slipping its casing? At any rate, you said “snarler” and laughed your way into a snort. “You probably didn’t need to push her quite so hard, Jimmy,” your wife said, in the taxi, heading home to your rented accommodation. “I mean, it was quite a thud. Did you really have to use both hands?”“Olivia, I’d have used more hands if I could,” you said. Another snort. And with that, as if suddenly triggered, the realisation that Archie would be up in three or four hours, and will want the full degustation: Bluey, PAW Patrol, and Peppa Fucking Pig.Olivia was a saint, they all said it. Behind your back. As well as right to your face. How on earth did she put up with you and all your antics? But you knew that Olivia knew that the real Jimmy wasn’t for anyone else. The real Jimmy was just for her. And for Archie now of course too. This other Jimmy smeared peanut butter all down the cupboards while making two thick sandwiches before bed, kicked one shoe out the window of the Airbnb. Woops! And ripped his tie off so quickly that the top button went with it. Also, only one cufflink on final count. You would sway through the new day, wasps in your throat, and a need to constantly scratch at your head. You would watch the cartoons with Archie, and then when he went back down, if he went back down, you would get a second wave of sleep too. You weren’t a bad guy. You just could not say no to the open bar. How, you wondered, could anyone say no to the open bar?“Who was that woman in the black dress?” Olivia stood at the top of the stairs. “I mean, she was awful, but she really set you off?”“Just someone from uni.”“Just someone?” “No. Not like that. Literally just someone. Part of the wider gang, obviously, I mean she was there at the wedding. But that’s the first time I’d seen her in 20 years I’d guess.” “Well, she had her eye on you all night, and most of the afternoon. Was she there alone? It seemed like it at least. She acted like it at least.” “What does that mean?”“I think you know what it means. Know many other married women that just go and lick the face of a married man in front of his wife?” “Beside you honey, no I don’t.”“You’re fucking funny Jimmy. And you’re fucking lucky, you know that? You’re fucking lucky that you’re fucking funny, but seriously, I am not sure how we face up later today at the Aftermatch.”“Aftermatch?”“You know, the next day BBQ. The thing. The wedding gloat.”“Ah, the post-mortem?”“Don’t call it that! But yes…”“Well, we just won’t go. Text and say Archie’s sick if you have to, I’ll do it. But also what’s the problem? Hair of the dog. Might be good…”“The problem, Jimmy, is a bunch of people saw you shove a drunk single woman to the ground, rather violently. The problem, Jimmy, is neither of us checked to see if she was okay, and no one has been in touch with us since, and it is going to be incredibly awkward turning up there as if nothing happened. When, Jimmy, something clearly happened.”You knew what happened. You could never say. There was an electrical current between you and Christine. You had this weird history, admittedly 20 years of radio silence, complete inactivity, seemingly the whole thing had shut itself down, gone away. But you had a history of both getting drunk and ending up in combative, hostile situations. You were dragons for the piss, both of you. And though you never exactly hooked up, there was baggage. You were in each other’s lives, at some point, and in the weirdest way. You went to her house one night and watched her sleep, used the spare key because all student flats had one and everyone knew where they were, and you had stumbled home from the pub and sat in a chair in her room while she snored and you watched. Just watched. She would do the same to you, a couple of weeks later, except you woke up with her on top of you. Straddling you, she had grabbed your hands and put them on her boobs, her hands behind your hands prompting you to squeeze. You’d pushed her to the side of the bed, gone straight to the fridge and necked a beer. “Jimmy, you’ve gone somewhere,” Olivia said. “Where are you? What are you thinking about?” “Nah. Nothing. Just hungover, zoning out love,” you said. “Well, I’m not lying about today. We are showering. We are going. Archie is not sick. And I do want Liz and Graham to meet him. And I do want you on best behaviour.”“When am I not though?” you said. Hoping for a laugh, and in the end supplying it yourself.At the vineyard they were all sitting on long wooden benches, a lot of chambray shirts. Too many cricket hats, bunch of unlikely outfielders you thought. And one or two dads throwing one or two Pétanque balls gently for their kids to marvel over, the clack-clattering of the children collecting these round trophies, disrupting games, burrowing them like a reverse Easter Egg hunt. You breezed past a few of last night’s dead soldiers with a dismissive wave, safe under sunglasses, you took a mimosa and asked if there was anything harder on offer. “Not for you,” came the curt reply from the matron of honour. “Ah well,” you said, “best make the ma-most of this one then, eh!” She probably groaned. But fuck it all. Olivia a vision, parading around wee Arch, the star of the day as far as you were concerned. I mean, Graham, Liz, sure. Their day obviously, but also, how long does this shit go on, right? It was their day yesterday. Liz instructed Graham where to sit, and they unwrapped a bunch of junk from the guests, and you flopped about in a beanbag talking to a kid about why Monsieur Donkey was the best character in Peppa Pig, especially when he just hammers Daddy Pig with how shit English food is, saying he brought all of this stuff over from France with him, because he knows the Poms need it, he lists bread and cheese, and even water. The kid looked at you, and shouted “Mummy!” A woman appeared behind bangs and whisked her child away. You slumped further. You must have nodded off for a bit, but talk about rude awakenings, no one around you at all, just a shadow of some legs and sticky wine all on you, Christine standing over, her legs spread widely, her skirt hitched right up. A close talker, lost for words. Just staring. You writhe about and wriggle free of the beanbag’s clutches, stand as if at attention. Christine pokes you hard in the chest. “We are going over there,” she says, and points to the tractor shed on the corner of the plot, just behind a couple of huge oak trees. Of course you worry Olivia will see this, of course you realise you haven’t talked to anyone else, apart from the Peppa Pig bit with the kid, which was rudely cut short by an uptight mum. In the tractor shed, Christine asks you how you’ve been. You say, “better.” She says, “I don’t doubt that.” You say, “Look, fuck, what even is all this anyway? We were fucking stupid drunk kids. Now we’ve grown up, let’s just…”“You still look like you’re stupid and drunk, just not a kid,” she cuts you off. “Jimmy, you look bad mate.”“Don’t call me mate.”“Alright then, non-fuck buddy. I mean, what even are we?”“We are two people who used to get messed up and didn’t know how to talk to one another sober and then got so drunk we couldn’t speak at all. We are two people from another lifetime.”“And yet, here we are.”“Yeah, but I didn’t even want to come today.”“I seem to recall that’s always been your problem, Jim. That time you basically lured me to your place, and I was there on top of you, and you push me aside for a fucking drink?!”“Look, just leave me alone, I didn’t think you had kept up with Liz, I didn’t expect to see you, I don’t know what to say to you, but um, look, we don’t need closure, we don’t need anything.”“Oh but the thing is, Jimmy, I saw the way you were looking at me. All fucking night. I know what you were thinking.”“Look Christine, you stupid fucking bitch, you are nothing. You’re just this fucking idea of a woman squeezed tight into a dress. You’re not what you think you are. I’m not what you think I am. I drink because I like it. You drink because you need to. I have a thirst. You think everyone’s thirsty for you. We are two different people. We’re not the same. We aren’t even the same as we used to be, well, I’m not. You might think I am, but you have no fucking idea. I’m a good guy, I just get, um, a bit muddled.”“Muddled? Muddled! See this fucking bruise right here?” She hitches the skirt once again. “That’s your fucking muddling.” “I mean, shit, fuck, I am really sorry about last night actually, but also what the fuck — you licked the side of my face like you owned me. We didn’t even speak a word to each other last night. In that sense, it was weirdly like the old days. But fuck you. In front of my wife…”“I want you to fuck me, Jimmy. Right now. Not in front of your wife, but right now, here, in this shed.”“Oh fuck off.” “And if you don’t, Jimmy, I will tell everyone here that you forced yourself on me. I’ll run from this shed fucking screaming, and crying. In front of the children, in front of your child. In front of your fucking wife.”“Christine. Fuck. You’re a psycho.”“Fuck me Jimmy!” And that’s when she reached for your belt. And what happened next is of course a blur. But it started with you holding your hands over her mouth, and it ended with her not being able to breathe for a bit. In the middle, she had her teeth on your fingers, and you pushed her hard. Or was it a punch? She was certainly doubled over. So you pushed her into the corner of the shed. Where she flopped down into the loose hay. It was soft there, so you put one of the big tarpaulins over her.Archie was much better at making friends than you were. You sat thinking about that as he played with the other kids, and you heard echoes of questions that eventually felt like you were meant to be answering them. You looked over and saw Olivia talking with Janey, one of the bridesmaids. You stood, waved. Olivia smiled, and you’re pretty sure Janey turned the other way. After a while, you decided it was time to go, and not just because you saw Christine tumbling along across the grass on one of her missions. “Well that was a nice day all up,” Olivia said in the car, heading home.“Yeah”, you replied. “It was okay.”“I didn’t see much of you though, those mimosas obviously went down better than should legally be the case after your efforts last night.”“What can I say darling, I’ve got a thirst. You know that.”“I do.”“They were an okay crowd, but fuck, I can’t do this sort of shit for too long, eh. I’m looking forward to being back at my desk. Back at work. Maybe a couple of days off the booze even.”“Well that would be something. I mean it would almost be a miracle, Jimmy. But I think you should try.”“I love you and Archie, you know that, eh?”“Of course darling, and we love you. And I think today is proof that you can do it. You can actually not have too much, not be too much. Not offend, or provoke, or get lost in the wrong version of yourself. I’m proud of you honey.”“You are the best thing that ever happened to me.”“But hey, I do have one question.”“Shoot.”“Black Dress?”“Um…”“What’s her name, Christine, is that it?”“Yeah, why?”“Oh, Liz said she saw you and, ah, Christine, heading off for a talk, so what was that about?”“Um, nothing. I mean, I knew, ah, we knew each other at university. I told you that. We always had this stupid kinda set of arguments or kinda dares or, I don’t know, just stupid stuff, eh.”“Okay?”“Olivia, it’s sorted. Okay. I didn’t really expect to see Christine. I didn’t want to. But she wanted to ask me why I pushed her off my lap. I told her she was drunk and stupid but I also apologised. And look, I think it’s sorted completely now.”“Well that is good to hear my love.”“Yeah, I mean I just know it’s not going to happen again.”“I’m proud of you Jimmy.”“I’m always proud of you.” “When you pushed her last night Jimmy…”“Yeah…”“Did she fall on anything? My memory is a bit hazy now too, but did she fall on anything?”“Um, the floor?”“Well, that’s what I thought, but Janey told me Christine was really limping. She wandered across the field at the end of the afternoon, visibly shaken, crying, holding her head in her hand. You reckon she’s a mess, so I am just going to assume that she’s upset and still dealing with stuff and we are heading in the right direction. Out of there…”“Ah, yeah, look I don’t remember if she hit anything.”“Well, did she have any bruises, or was she limping when you were talking to her Jimmy? I feel like that’s a pretty simple question.”“It is. And yeah, I mean she’s a fucking fall-down drunk to be honest, so it’s likely isn’t it. But I can’t give you specifics, you see I really don’t like looking at her face ever. I mean, that’s what got us into this mess to begin with, right?”“Us?”“Me.”“You! Yeah. But you’ve sorted it now right?”“I have.”“And you apologised.”“I did. I’m certainly very sorry.”Back at the Airbnb, you put the sausages on the BBQ. You always liked to do simple things like a quick dinner. Your way of helping. You wanted to help when able. You’d miss this. All of this. Olivia started packing for the trip home the next day. Archie was still asleep in his car seat, in the rental. They both looked so beautiful. Olivia, always, but especially when in motion. Archie forever, but maybe especially when not in motion. You had the car door open, you had the Bluetooth speaker on the tabletop of the outdoor furniture, playing Yanni’s Live At The Acropolis full bore. “What is it with you and Yanni?”“It’s my perfect soundtrack! I mean he’s new age, right? I’m just a new age guy basically.”“Oh right. And sensitive too I guess?”“I mean, there are certain sensitivities I have. I definitely get close to tears when the liquor cabinet is looking grim.”“Oh god Jimmy, come on…”“Nah, I genuinely do love Yanni though. It’s the music. The emotion. The stirring. But also, he’s a short Latino guy dressed all in white. You just know that dude is down to fuck.”“Um… I don’t know much about Yanni, but I know he’s not a Latino. He’s from Greece.”“Hey, Latin/Greece, they both invented drama! Anyway, it’s all Greek to me!”You take the plate of sausages over to the table, and the one on top has split slightly, it looks like it’s about to wriggle from its casing. You and her both have a chuckle. No words. None needed. She smiles at you, so you know what you have to do. You take the sausage, and peel it slowly from itself, as if a banana. You then squeeze as hard as you can, a tight fist around the base of this snarler. Its flesh bursting in a mash all over the plate. You both laugh, despite the visible bite marks on your hand. You both laugh. Just enjoying this last meal together.Sounds Good! is a reader-supported publication. 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