We’re delighted to publish the winning entries, and the runners up, from our 2021 short story competition. Young writers from all over Ireland competed for prizes of €250, sponsored by Tertulia Books in association with Spot-Lit EU. The competition’s theme, “Waves”, inspired work of an extremely high standard. The winners were selected by acclaimed YA author and guest judge Deirdre Sullivan. We thank all who entered and we encourage everyone to keep writing.
We will be publishing a story every day this week.
Eavan O’Keefe (17) from Kildare took the senior prize for Our Footsteps in the Sand. The story was published in Issue 6.
Our Footsteps in the Sand by Eavan O’Keefe
“Can you hear it?” you ask, whispers warm against my cheek – a refuge from the hostile breeze of the Atlantic.
I turn to you, our bodies so close that they become one. Only here can I feel safe. “What?”
Your smile surfaces – that smile meant only for me, that can speak without saying a word. My heart grows wings and flutters off into the wisps of cloud languidly wandering through the evening sky above. “The ocean – it’s breathing,” you answer.
Over the rocks, strewn about as if by vaunting giants, and across the beach where sand meets sea, the fading summer sun paints this ocean of secrets in vivid watercolour hues. I hear its breath. Gentle, almost like a sigh of sorrow, as the waves advance and retreat, advance and retreat – never ending. Immortal, as we wish we could be, in this moment.
“I don’t think it’s alive, though,” I reply, staring at your eyes; piercing like an eagle’s yet as warm as roasted chestnuts.
Everything about us, from how we look to how we love, is a dichotomy. You, with tense muscles, curled hair against pale freckled skin. Me, body at risk of being stolen away with a strong gust, the colour of my skin telling a story that some people in this town aren’t sure if they like or not. Two opposites, breathing each other’s breaths, our hearts like a lock and key, wondering quietly who told us that our sacred secret is a sin, and why.
I turn to the ocean. I can’t bear the intensity of your eyes. It’s like a fire burning through me that I never want to extinguish. “It’s not alive. It doesn’t cry, or laugh, or love,” I whisper, adamant that living and being alive are as different as dying and dead.
Your calloused hand drifts up to my cheek, grazing my skin, raising goosebumps. So soft with me, yet around others you turn from a delicate flower into something so brutal, so defensive; a castle to hide in, the walls your façade.
Vulnerability scares you.
It’s why you hide your art under your bed, isn’t it? For how could a tough boy in west Ireland create such unguarded beauty? And for what other reason would we hide our secret from the world and only show it to the hulking, wind-battered cliffs that enclose this secluded beach just like your hands closing over mine?
“And do you live? Do we?” Your voice is thick and musical, sounding discordant when intertwined with my own.
I glance back to those eyes I could swim in. Just as deep as the ocean, yet twice as tumultuous. You pretend the question means nothing, but you’ve already let me past your stone walls, and you know that I’m not a fool.
There’s a giddy power in knowing I can set your heart ablaze. So my gaze drifts down to your lips, and I answer.
***
I wake up to a shout cutting through the sleep-laden air of the dark room – my father, waking me up for work at the restaurant. In the stillness, I hear the shallow, relentless echoes of the clock’s feeble ticking.
I’m late.
Unlike me, my father never sleeps in, never truly rests. Nor is he one to look back and ponder where the waves have taken his footsteps. For him, it’s a matter of survival. Fleeing to a foreign country, he never forgot the burden of having to tirelessly dig into the hard soil to plant roots, for fear that tomorrow they could be ripped up and leave us to wither.
Dressing, stomach moaning, I check my phone and see your string of texts. I read them just once, and everything—everything, changes. Your words turn my heart inside out, wrenching it out of my chest, baring my fragile beauty to the rough world outside.
shit
my mam knows about us
she found the necklace you gave me and your top in my room
call me
Our secret – our delicate, twisting cathedral of hidden beauty, crumbles to the ground. The chambers of my heart twist, tightening like the knot of a rope pulled taut – the pain of it like glass shards slicing at my bone.
What does this mean? The answer is a poison that lingers in my mind. I try to call you but my fingers won’t let me, held back as if by the strings of a marionette.
Another shout – rising anger, two knocks on my door like gunshots.
I can’t do it…
***
Your mother came to the restaurant that day.
Her eyes, those orbs of deadly righteousness, stare down at me. She is one who wields her weapon and slaughters without mercy.
We both know why she’s here. She offers a smile. Her eyes linger for just a second too long as she pays.
A warning. A threat.
I’m powerless.
The air sparks with the tension of a secret known but never spoken—never spoken. That’s the one thing she makes sure to tell me, with those blood-drenched, grinning lips and eyebrows like steel daggers.
How much of her blood rushes through your own veins? Do you despise the clay from which you are made? Is that why you came to me, so I can remake you? But I’m no god, just a beast in the wilderness, and you can’t change what’s inside you when you aren’t sure if you want it gone.
***
At last I call you, those cheerful ringtones mocking me. Your voice answers – different.
Empty.
Dying.
You’re wearing that façade, even though it’s just the two of us. You ask, “do you remember my uncle, the parish priest?”
I do.
The word sin – a lie – is too sharp to get past the narrow constrictions of my throat. It chokes me.
You say we won’t be able to see each other: you haven’t been spending enough time with family, you need to train more. Whose words are these? You are cruel now to be kind later, yet there’s no such thing as a painless death.
We say goodbye. Just a single word. Nothing more.
Tears well on my cheeks, sorrow as deep as the ocean at midnight.
Yet all I hear is silence.
***
Summer is now a withered autumn leaf barely clinging to its branch, and the weather has grown vengeful and vindictive. Last time I saw you, in this small tomb of a town that seems to be made mostly of walls and pedestals and gallows, you were changed. You’ve become addicted to your masquerade, treasuring it like a panacea.
But then, out of nowhere – as strange as hearing birds singing at midnight, I see your name on the pale blue glow of my phone.
meet me at our beach
please
Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t say no.
***
Our cliffs seem more like a cage than a sanctuary when I see them now. Everything seems entirely—painfully, ordinary. Our secret made no marks on the ancient moss-stained rocks, the waves washing away every trace of our history on the sand.
When I see you, standing at that same spot where our bodies used to be as intertwined as fate itself, I think you are someone else.
Hair cut with brute force using a blunt scissors, wearing that cursed necklace out over the front of a treasonous t-shirt – the downfall of our cathedral of fragile possibilities. Dried tears stain your rosy cheeks – or maybe it’s the sorrow of the heavens raining down.
No matter. Your eyes are aflame and as determined as a spark of lightning. No doubt, no uncertainty, no more war raging between who you are, and who they say you are.
“Seán,” you whisper, making me believe I was given this name just so you could call me by it.
“Cian,” I answer, the word sounding strange on my tongue, like the scent of a flower I haven’t smelled for years – a memory of a moment lost to time.
Jaw tense, you say; “I’m going to America, to art college. I don’t want to hide this. I know it’s right. I know we are right.”
Silence lingers. The air is heavy, weighed down by my thoughts and your hopes.
You look out to the ocean and let out a sigh you were holding ever since I first kissed you. “Can’t you feel that this town is stifling?” It’s all I’ve ever felt. “No one here is alive, they’re all just ghosts – reflections, imitations. We’ll breathe our final breath in this cage if we don’t leave.”
Survival. That’s what it’s all about. That’s why you came to me.
You reach out and hold my hand with a softness that steals my breath. I want to sink into you. “Come with me-“
“-I can’t,” I mumble, because it’s impossible to say I can.
“Why not!”
“I-I can’t!”
You shake your head and bridge the distance between us.
I can feel your breath.
Refuge.
How desperately it calls out to me, like a mother’s womb. “Don’t lie to yourself! You could be whoever you want! I’ve seen your poems. You only hide them from me because you’re afraid I’ll love you more for them. And I know what you fear most is the possibility of doing what you truly love, but you don’t have to be afraid. Just come with me, please…”
How dare you speak these unspoken, blistering truths, revealing me to myself? They sting like sand thrown into my eyes, buffeted by the winds of a raging storm.
“No. I can’t…”
Why can’t I?
“Please-!”
“-I don’t love you!”
The words slash through the air – deadly.
“Don’t lie,” you whisper.
You’re right.
I love you like a December sunrise, like a rainbow in the night, like a cool breeze called relief on a blistering June afternoon.
Yet can’t you see that freedom has a cost I can’t afford?
In my hand, you place the necklace that belongs to both of us – a tether. My fingers close around it as you say, “I’ll wait for you,” almost like a prayer.
No. You will forget about me. Please, forget me!
Your forehead rests against mine. “As long as the water breathes, even though I’m an ocean away, I’ll still feel your heartbeat just like when my hand rested on your chest.”
If you’re holding on to me, then you’re holding on to nothing!
Your hand leaves mine. The air is empty and cold.
“I love you,” you say, turning to walk away without hiding your tears.
Vulnerable.
Beautiful.
Hours later, when the only thing left of you is your faint footsteps in the sand, I take the necklace and hurl it into the ocean – not out of hate, but love.
I scream until my lungs burn, my cries of anguish swallowed by the waves as they begin to thunder down on to the beach that just lost its most beautiful secret.
***
Days drag past.
Twilight falls like a silk cloth over the water. The beach is now more a memory than a place, and the ocean is taking weak, shallow breaths. I wonder if it’s dying.
I walk along the sand, then suddenly something snags on my shoe. A glint of silver in a sea of gold dust.
Our necklace.
The waves return our sorrows to us, it seems.
I glance behind me and see my footsteps stolen by the water. My past, my history – gone. What lies ahead?
Nothing…
Not a single footstep ahead of me. My future is unwritten.
A fire in my chest kept alight by the slightest ember of hope suddenly sparks.
Why can’t I?
I can – no, I must!
I deserve your love, my freedom. I deserve life!
In the sand, I write to you. The water laps at the words, hungry, eager to steal these traced letters. I let the waves take my message to you, to carry it across the ocean.
i am coming to you, coming home.
Bio: I am an aspiring young writer, canoeist and artist. I enjoy exploring the hidden vulnerabilities of characters in my work and trying to reveal a deeper truth about who we are as humans, and how we treat one another. I’m passionate about delving into modern themes and ensuring there is diversity in my work to better represent our culture and society. I wrote this short story about the dichotomies and paradoxes of love, centred around a modern Irish life and identity, yet one which does not ignore some of the cruel prejudices that remain from a time we have moved on from. I enjoyed writing about the turmoil of teenage life and the inward search for hope as we aim to empower the most true version of ourselves.
