September 2026

Laura O’Meara, Kept

Those mad bastard puffins cavort around the cliff tops without a care on them. Like they weren’t a hair’s breadth from dropping down to the raging sea. Beneath, Sean struggles with the tour boat in the swelling waves. The wind assaults as soon as he opens his mouth. His short list of puffin facts torn away and dashed against the rocks.

No great loss. The gaggle of local women – Mrs. Heaphy, Mrs. Hayes, Mrs. Rourke – come out here every second Thursday and have heard it all before. The group of misdirected American tourists are dear-life clinging to the boat’s splintery sides and in no state to hear about breeding cycles. The other passenger – Mrs. Heaphy’s niece, down from Dublin – has looked only at her phone since getting in.

“They must make an awful racket at night, Sean,” Mrs. Heaphy wonders as they pass beneath the rows of demented birds. “You must get no sleep at all,”

He shakes his head. “It’s not that bad,”

Nights on the island were troubled by less explainable sounds. But that’s never part of the tour.

Sean swings them around to the island’s south side. Back towards the lighthouse and the end of the tour. Mrs. Hayes and Mrs. Heaphy marvel at the wildflowers rippling along the cliff edges. Just below, Sean sees her for the first time that day. She’s clambering along a ledge, through the puffin nests. Pale, thin limbs wrapped in seaweed trailings. She smiles, a gash splitting her small face. No lips or mouth to frame it. Sean salutes, an almost wave. She wriggles in recognition.

“Are you meant to be saluting the puffins, Sean?” Mrs. Rourke asks “Is that a lighthouse keeper thing?”

Sean shrugs and steers them on. Scatterings of rocks trouble the way back to the lighthouse. The island’s slow escape from itself.

“That was where they pulled Michael Shea out, wasn’t it?” Mrs Heaphy asks, pointing to one fanged edge “He was the last one before you?”

“More hole than man when they got him out,” Mrs Rouke adds “Terrible tragedy,”

“But better than the lad before that? Thomas something? Never found,”

A turn into the next surging wave would tip the boat and put a stop to the doom-mongering. But “drowning the tourists” was likely on the long list of disqualifiers from the Inis Caol Lighthouse Competition. Sean keeps the boat straight instead.

She follows alongside them, hopping from rock to rock. Skin sliding off waving fingers. And another pair of eyes on him too. Mrs. Heaphy’s niece looking up from the back of the boat. The talk of ill-fated lighthouse keepers the only thing to interest her all morning.

In the yard outside the lighthouse, upturned chairs huddle around an empty table. Rogue polystyrene cups caper between them.

“Are we not getting the tea like we usually do?” Mrs. Hayes asks, crossing her arms as Sean pulls in.

“Alice’ll just be inside, sorting things out,”

Sean helps them out of the boat and into the yard. He rights the chairs and wipes at the fresh spatter of birdshite congealing on the table.

“We’re probably just early. I’ll go give her a hand,”

In the kitchen, the kettle is cold and the boxes of biscuits still wrapped. Upstairs, the lamps are unlit. The fire let burnt down to ash. Alice hunches in her chair in the corner. The mildew eaten book dangling from her hands open at the same page since that morning.

“Alice,” Sean sighs “It’s ten minutes, twice a week,”

Though this objection didn’t make much difference last time. Or the time before that.

“They’ll complain if this keeps happening,”

She blinks. Twitches flaking lips. Nothing much comes out.

“Didn’t… time,”

Sean swears his way back down to and around the kitchen. He clatters cups and plates outside.

“Here we are. Sorry for the wait. Alice is a bit under the weather,”

The ladies cluck and coo and reach for the custard creams. The Americans hunch over the steaming cups.

“No wonder. Must be a lot of work keeping this place running,” Mrs Hayes says.

“Four months you have left now, is it?” Mrs Rourke asks.

“Then you’ll be away,” Mrs Heaphy adds “You’ll be the first ones to win this in a long time,”

“Please God,”

The niece is no longer with them. She’s drifted over to the end of the yard, thin jacket flapping and legs mottling blue through her fishnet tights. She’s staring at the battered steps leading up to the rest of the island.

“You can’t go any further,” Sean tells her, approaching with a cup of tea. “The rest of the island is protected. Bird sanctuary,”

“This is all the space you have?”

She refuses the tea and lights a cigarette instead. Black pointed fingernails cup around the struggling flame.

“Where are you going once you win and can get the fuck out of here?”

A desert, he thinks. The Sahara. The Atacama. Somewhere that could desiccate. Pull out the eight months of damp eroding his insides.

“The prize money has to go towards a house deposit. So not too far,”

She laughs, holds out a cigarette. His stare must have a hunger to it.

“I’m Bryony. I’m down here for a few weeks while I work on my art,”

“Oh. Right,”

Then she’s saying something about the energies here. So raw. Like something torn open. But this is his first cigarette in months. The nicotine is deliciously distracting. He’s not following at all.

“Could I come back one night?” she asks “Could I film something? It would be so authentic,”

“What?”

Bryony pulls out her phone. Flashes pictures of her posed in woodlands or out on rocks. Heavier make up and fewer clothes. Sean backs away.

“No one is allowed out here. Unless it’s a tour. It’s part of the rules,”

“How will anyone know?”

She is watching them from the lighthouse. Curved feline on one of the window ledges, scrawls of hair flying.

“I can get myself out here,” Bryony continues “You won’t have to do a thing. Please?”

“I don’t…”

Bryony twirls her cigarettes.

“My mam has just come back from Agadir. I’ll bring you a duty-free sized box of these for the trouble,”

Soft fingers reach out to pull his apart. She presses the cigarette packet into his roughened palm. Her touch burns, despite the shiver of the rest of her. Like those nails are boring down, deeper than bone. It’s the first time someone has touched him in months.

“Yes… OK,” is all he can stutter out after that.

Delighted, she claps her hands.

“What about tonight. Unless you have plans?”

“Sure,”

Just for the cigarettes, mind. Not for anything that might be attached to them.

“Sean! Kathleen!” Mrs Heaphy squalls from the table “We’ll need to be heading back. The bingo starts at half 4,”

Sean ferries the group back to the mainland. Mrs Heaphy waves with a promise of See you soon, Sean. Her niece smirks with a See you sooner.

The rest of the day is an agony of waiting. Minutes uncooperative, refusing to pass into hours. She keeps him company for a while, feet hooked around a different window ledge. The dangling has dislodged her eyes. Black pools sliding down her face. He waves and she stretches out a smile.

He walks tracks around the yard. The wind tears extra layers off his face that’s already seen enough weather. But better than inside. The weak hissing of the gas stove unable to stop his limbs from stiffening. Alice slumped wordless in that chair. All these months had softened her. She was bloating up, becoming buoyant. Something fit only for bobbing in unseen corners.

During the first few months, he had clung onto the idea of them sitting inside somewhere warm again. Holding hands on their new sofa in their finally afforded house. The latest home improvement programme showing them what could have been, if only they’d dreamed a little bigger.

But the island’s seaweed stink would never leave them. The salt stung cracks between his fingers would never heal.

Once the sun has taken itself away, he sits on the jetty and lights one of Bryony’s cigarettes. Once or twice, there is the promise of faint lights in the distance. But it’s just the moonlight thrown wild on the waves.

She won’t come. Unable or unwilling to get a boat. Just a couple more hours then, and he could retreat to bed. Penance out the rest of the competition undisturbed.

Halfway through the sixth cigarette comes a thrumming. Undismissable. An engine roaring towards the island. Sean jumps up. Hoping, too late now, there are no watching cameras on the jetty, like there are on the mainland. Or that the noise doesn’t disturb Alice and be the first thing to push her out of that chair in weeks.

“Sean!” Bryony calls. One hand waving, the other tight around her phone. Someone else is bent over the engine, guiding the boat in.

“This is amazing!”

She springs out as soon as the boat bumps up. She spins in dramatic arcs, filming the towering lighthouse and pulsing sea. Her companion slow knots ropes, throws out a bag.

“Ryan!” Bryony snaps “Hurry up! Let’s go,”

“Go?” Sean asks “Where?”

“Up there, of course,”

She points to the steps leading up to the actual island.

“No one wants to watch me do anything in your shit-stained back yard,”

Ryan trots after her, backpack dutifully strapped on, without a word or even a look at Sean. Who can’t help but laugh. overcome with the hilarity of Bryony actually driving a boat out here by herself. What an idiot. He checks back at the lighthouse. No lights lit. No curiosity stirred. Then he follows up the steps.

They battle across the barren, wind shorn grass of the island proper. It takes ten minutes or more for the right energies to manifest themselves to Bryony, beside a hump of rock too close to the suck and smash of the sea. She chalks a circle but fails to get her collection of black candles to even stand up, let alone light. She sets music to struggle out of an unsteady speaker. Her waterproofs come off and scraps of black lace tremor around pale skin. Sean keeps the cliffs’ savage edges picked out with his torch beam while Ryan huddles into himself, job done. Bryony mounts her phone on one of the rocks and talks into it. Nothing that makes much sense. Then she starts chanting. Heavy, throat-sticking syllables that can’t be any language.

The cliffs cackle back at her, alive with the cawing of birds, the skittering of claws along the ledges beneath. Sean pulls his light away from the edge, afraid of summoning an outraged cloud of wings instead of whatever Bryony is calling for. He thinks – too late again – about where noise level monitors might be placed. About their tracks scarred through the grass and the cigarette ends collecting at Ryan’s feet.

The competition will find out about this. He’s absolutely fucked it.

Then something wails. Nothing a puffin could make. It’s a tearing, like sheets of metal wrenching apart. It knocks Sean sideways. He drops the torch, hands clamping to his ears. Bryony chants on, swaying. Ryan dangles his feet over the cliff edge.

The scream swells towards them. Something on all fours snaking across the grass. Bare skin burning, lit from within. Hole of a mouth stretched wide. She is coming for them.

“Stop,” Sean gasps “That’s enough. Let’s go back,”

Bryony glares, mid-twirl.

“Shh,” she hisses “You’ll ruin it,”

The wailing drills. A bone penetrating, teeth splintering noise.

“Stop!” Sean pleads, this time to the figure who has now reached them, shuddering on the rocks above.

Ryan looks up, confused.

Her limbs are flaking. Whatever passes for skin sloughing off. She’s disappearing. Bryony’s garbling is eating into her.

But she’s the only thing that ever smiles at him out here.

“Stop!”

Sean kicks through the circle towards Bryony, hands scrabbling for her mouth.

“Hey!”

Bryony pushes back at him. Sean stumbles and unbalances her as well. The moss stained, shit spattered ground is slippery. Bryony’s vicious nails grasp for the rocks, for the damp grass, for a helping hand. But there is nothing. She slides down and over the edge. Another scream. Softer, soon cut off.

“What the -”

Ryan staggers up. But he was already on the edge. It’s only a small push to take him over.

Another splash. Then silence. Even the birds have stilled.

Sean slides down, legs pulpy. She crouches with him, solid once more. Crooked fingers caress his cheek. The first time she’s ever been so close. Sean leans in, despite the singe of her skin against his. He tangles his fingers through her hair. So soft. It whispers around him. Sweet like sun-swollen wildflowers. She sighs, chittering against him.

Then she rises, hopping away again along the rocks. Sean claws himself up and follows her, for as long as he can.

The ground is indeed slippery that night.

Author biography:
Laura O’Meara is a writer who grew up in the UK and has since translocated to Valenica, Spain. Her short fiction has appeared in places such as Nature Futures, Turn and Work and In the Veins. She is currently working on her first novel.