Short story: Full Time, by Connor McNabb

2026-02-27 - 17:08

They say my brother died like a cat. After the beating he lay on the road unmoving and leaking both from his nose and ears, his teammates figured him dead where he landed. Turned to mush, was the description given to police. But to their surprise—and my pride—something in Bowie’s leaking, mushy head brought him to his feet. They say he tried to talk to them, but I think they overestimate their own importance. Because who the hell would want to have a conversation with the group of people that beat them to death? I take that back. They didn’t beat him to death, because he got back up after the beating. Bowie got up, and he gurgled something that if it could be translated into any known language, I would like to think means nice try, assholes. But the sound was probably more like boiling water, or some industrial machine ripping its insides apart after someone hit the emergency stop button. The point is, he got up and he ran, off of the road and into the trees. That is where he died. We didn’t mean to, his teammates said. We just wanted to scare him. The coroner told us Bowie was likely brain dead when he ran, that it was a physical response like a twitch, or spasm that he had no control over. I never believed that. Outrunning five 1st XV players with your insides pouring out of your head is not a twitch. My brother was always the fastest one on the team, so I’m not at all surprised he managed to outrun them. But to outrun death, even if only for a few steps? What a waste of energy. So that’s what I mean when I say he wasn’t beaten to death. My brother was beaten, yes, but he got up, and he decided where and when to die. He curled up in the dark among the frozen leaves and the broken bottles, and died like a cat. It happened on a Saturday, and you could tell it was by the pile of muddied boots stacked outside of the local pub, and the unnoticed absence of women. It was a damp winter night certain to freeze over, and chimney smoke coiling up and up was forced back down by the heavy night to cling to the small town, blunting its colour like beard trimmings against a wet sink. The town had been lost for a long time in black; the feeling, the jerseys, the debt. It was a place left behind by the turning world, lingering in the past had curdled its ideas and thickened progress to a standstill long before my time. That’s why I left, there was nothing for me there. My brother never spoke of leaving, I know now he probably thought that he didn’t belong anywhere—and I can’t blame him, even if he was wrong. If you can’t belong in the middle of nowhere, where on Earth would you belong? Our Dad, like all the others, had been at the pub since the local games had finished earlier in the day. They watched the dogs chasing meat all afternoon and into the evening, betting and beating their fists against the leaners. Just before seven-thirty the channel changed, the ladies in the kitchen were hit with orders, and the men sat back to watch the boys play. Their own boys kicked at the backseats and rummaged through gloveboxes, reading the local maps and repair receipts. A few of the older kids listened to the game on the radio, while the youngest of the lot spoke through sodium lights, flicking the domes on and off and on again. Engulfed on all sides by a heavy dark, their blurry silhouettes seized through the dewy windshields like a far off shadow play, sending light to each other to make the night a little less terrifying. A lonely regional dialect passed down through the generations, developed over identical Saturdays such as this one; spent waiting for the raspberry lemonades and chips promised hours ago, the bribes to not tell mum where dad had forced them to spend the day. This particular Saturday, our Mum, like all the others, readied dinner for reheating at the return of their husbands. A clean tear of clingwrap and close of the fridge and their days were done just before kickoff, hoping to get as much sleep as possible before their drunken, demanding return. She was fast asleep when her son died. My brother was at the pub too, though he left soon after halftime—the game was a wash—with five others from his high school team. Heading to a party, they said to a few of the punters in the smoker’s area who saw them off into the night. My father didn’t count among the official witnesses as he was what the headlines deemed intoxicated, but would be much more accurately described as shitfaced. He had no idea his son was in the same building. Years later, it would come out that one of the kids in the cars heard a few of the boys calling my brother a faggot as they moved through the carpark. But the promise of silence in exchange for a soft drink and fried food apparently extended to the police, and it was never mentioned. They were just kids, after all. He was the only one of the group invited to the party, it wasn’t a rugby thing. My brother was easy to get along with, he didn’t care who you were or what you did with your time. I think his teammates resented that his life didn’t revolve around rugby, and yet he was better on the field than any of them. A few caught wind of this party and insisted on coming. They said my brother didn’t push back against the idea—though he never said yes—which only set a cheat code exclusive to Kiwi boys even deeper into place: so long as you don’t hear the word no, you’re good to go. It was the first of many stupid things decided that night by unanimous vote of the pack, and any potential blame was already being spread out evenly amongst the group into easily digestible, shameless pieces. Like when you see a group of men catcalling a girl on a night out, or laughing together at a racist joke told far too loudly at the Uni library. You’re watching a relationship form from a negative; holding one another ransom at the joint sacrifice of morality and a sense of selfhood in exchange for a place, and protection, in the pack. There’s always one too many of them to confront. And who should you blame, the comedian or the audience? We living things learned quickly there’s safety in numbers, blending in like a roman shield wall, or a school of fish; the Persians or a pod of Orcas are still going to try and kill you, but at least those to your left and right share the same odds as you do. Who wouldn’t choose losing themselves over losing their lives? Watch closely and you’ll see the packs roaming the length of the country day and night; wolves and sheep alike, howling and harassing and bleating and beating. Brotherhoods uniformed in matching jerseys, gang patches, and expensive suits. On this particular night they wore matching striped socks still on from the game they won together, only hours before sacrificing one of their own to bind the rest tighter. The people who did this to my brother were not strangers to him. Before playing rugby they played in sandpits. They learned to run and catch together. I remember when they all got food poisoning, the butcher who gave out saveloys after kindy on Wednesdays accidentally handed out a bad batch, and by Friday they were still too sick to play. Mum organised for Bowie to host a movie night for the team, they watched Transformers and were too nervous to eat the snacks Mum put out, and instead sipped on their little discount lemonade bottles. Dad thought they were fine to play, so it was only a happy memory for half of the household, rarely remembered. Now none of us speak of it. For years, these boys sheepishly exchanged handmade birthday cards thanking each other for being their friend, with the ritual eventually turning into “cheers for being a good mate” messages. The most recent was sent only a month before Bowie’s death, found when the local police searched their phones as part of the investigation. But to their surprise there was nothing to indicate any bad blood between them, save for a pattern spotted by a team of investigators taught to read the intricacies of teenage speak like hieroglyphs. Whenever they spoke about girls, Bowie never got involved. He died just over the halfway point between the pub and the house where the party was taking place. A fact that the defence quickly jumped on, because apparently if you really wanted to beat somebody nearly to death, you wouldn’t wait and it would have been done at the pub like the usual drunk and violent offenders this country has on offer. Anything after halfway is clearly unplanned, accidental, and of course, deeply regrettable—but certainly not murder. Even now, I can’t decide what about the event was accidental and what was planned. They all folded quickly after it happened, being completely shitfaced and the adrenaline wearing off, they all bolted back to the pub once they were certain he was dead. He wasn’t blinking. They burst in the front door yelling for an ambulance. Bowie’s been hit by a car. They lied, so that was planned. I won’t tell you the name of the great thinker who came up with that idea through racked breaths on the sprint back, but I will say he coupled the admission with a promise that he only stomped on Bowie’s head just one time, when it all started. Because the attack lasted no less than four minutes—and he was the youngest of the group having just turned sixteen—he read in the press as a tragic case of the dangers of peer pressure. Poor kid. Forced to land the first blow and stuck watching the rest of it happen. Evidence found blood on his sneakers, so that first hit was hard enough to split my brother open. Peer pressure. Often I wonder if he had said no whether or not the other forty-something stomps and kicks would have happened. He made his choice, and we’re all living with it. Well. When a few of the guys from the pub arrived at the scene with Bowie’s teammates in the back of their ute—to no sight of a body—the pack turned on one another once they couldn’t come up with a good reason why the car coming from uhhh, that way, had punted my brother’s body forty feet in the completely wrong direction from where they were pointing. That lie, accidentally stupid, was planned. So my brother’s death—accidental and stupid—I say was planned, too. Accidents take effort. Killing my brother took no effort. Asked what was on his mind when he wrote his short story, Connor McNabb replied, “I made a point in 2025 to read more works by our writers and poets, knowing far too little about our country’s literary history to comfortably call myself a writer. This story is largely a result of that process. The play Foreskin’s Lament by Greg McKee, a tattered copy of Frank Sargeson’s short stories, and the poetry of JC Sturm were key influences.”