Competition Thirty-Five Shortlisted: Sentinel by Brendan Maurice Sheehy

Every morning Darragh walked the cliffside path alone. Not ritual. Penance. Always within his eyeline stood an unmoving figure. Stolid. Silent. Lingering on the horizon with its gaze fixed upon him. A sentinel at the edge of the world. At first, he thought it was some strange aberration, a sea demon the old women sometimes spoke of. But it was neither stranger nor demon. Far from it. The same faded denim jacket. Those unevenly slumped shoulders. It could only be Rory.

Darragh still had Rory’s mass card on his side table. His recollection had become like a tattered reel in a projector, blotchy and missing key scenes. Drink, their reliable social elixir, betrayed them both that night. Whiskey-soaked bravado needlessly escalated to shouting. There was no dramatic motive. Just a clumsy shove. Darragh did nothing but watch Rory fall. The dark sea swallowed him right up. As if it barely cared.

An accident they declared. Sher they were best friends. That terrain is treacherous, easy to lose your footing. Darragh waited for someone to cast blame, unravel his lies. Nobody stepped up. The truth was lost between the simple-minded platitudes and the jagged rocks. All that remained of it stretched along the line of sight between them.

Darragh tried to run to him. One step or one thousand steps, it didn’t matter. He might as well have been chasing a phone at the end of a selfie stick. The distance between them never changed. He darted his eyes back and forth. Rory matched every frenzied twitch, tattooed onto Darragh’s eyeball. His own personalised mirage.

Darragh dropped to his knees.
“What do you want from me?”
The wind stripped his cry bare.
“What do I have to do?”
He shut his eyes.
A cold damp hand wrapped tightly around his arm.