Isobel Tynan

“If I can make it there” by Isobel Tynan

Submitted to Contest #190

People talk about getting that harrowing call from home. A gravely ill parent, a tragic accident. The adrenalin-fuelled charge to the airport. Touch-and-go whether you’d make it back in time. My version of gut-wrenching dread, the one that keeps me up at night, is different. It’s rounding a corner or strolling into a coffee shop.  For just a moment, my thoughts are elsewhere, and my guard is down. Then, slap-bag.  I bump into someone from home. Perhaps there’s an initial half-smile. A hazy acknowledgment. But this is no meet...

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“Digging Up The Past” by Isobel Tynan

Submitted to Contest #166

Digging Up The PastSensitive content-Contains a reference to a missing personMISSING. That first September teaching, in my home-town university, the poster was everywhere. Plastered onto shopfronts, nail-gunned to weathered, wooden poles, pinned to each faculty’s bulletin-board.The subject of the poster was a grinning young man, in billowing graduation robes, his mortar board skew-ways. Clutching his hand, was a tiny blonde girl, wearing too-big fairy wings, laughing up at him.“His little sister,” Joan, the new Dean, told me.“...

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“Spread your wings and take to the sky” by Isobel Tynan

Submitted to Contest #149

The night the Inspector yanked me aside was the hottest that summer. I was already late and my boss, her eyes a dark warning, had enunciated in her accented English: “YOU MUST NOT BE LATE AGAIN.” I always intended to go to bed, to rest, to recover after the graveyard-shift. Mostly, I didn’t. Somewhere, along the train ride home my eyes, heavy with sleep, would flutter closed, my head loll against the window.  Then I’d be jerked awake by the sudden stop at Les Halles. The temptation to explore the city in the gentle morning heat wou...

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“Leap of Faith” by Isobel Tynan

Submitted to Contest #147

On the tenth anniversary of Jack’s death you take a final glance around your temporary home. The lumpy sofa bed, the two ring hob with its sputtering gas flame, the grubby walls that weep with damp come autumn. Steadying yourself on a chair, you breathe in the brackish stink of the Liffey and wrench the sky light closed. On the bockety wooden table, you’ve bundled the photo albums,  bread crumb trails of your early lives.  Your Mum and Dad, dazed and smiling with one baby, then three.  All of you on the boat, hands trai...

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“All that glitters” by Isobel Tynan

Submitted to Contest #138

It was over coffee. In her light-filled kitchen, with its distressed oak seating, bright white walls and the expensive, nutty waft of roasted caramel pervading the room.I’d rehearsed what I was going to say. Over and over for the past three weeks. In the mirror. On the train. Still, my fingers twisted the sugar packets into tight knots. I couldn’t drink my cooling cappuccino.Sarah, as always, oblivious to another’s emotional turmoil, prattled on, occasionally flicking her freshly coiffed hair.Finally, I blurted it out.“I know about...

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“Staying Afloat” by Isobel Tynan

“But we’re just married six months” I explained to the young doctor in the green scrubs.  “Please, Help him! Don’t waste time talking to me!” He sighed softly and turned away, the lift and slap of his slip-on sneakers echoing down the polished corridor until he disappeared from sight through the operating doors. Through the high sash windows, the afternoon sun gilted the dull plastic chairs, the beige walls haphazardly plastered with posters for vaccinations and patient clinics and the dusty clock on the wall beating out time. In t...

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“Time travelling” by Isobel Tynan

Submitted to Contest #120

Ais and I had never actually met Granny. From her photo, we weren’t sure we wanted to. Pinned between the album’s curling cellophane sleeves, Granny’s sepia likeness cast a formidable figure. Rigidly posed, tightly buttoned in her floor-sweeping black dress, she fixed us with a Medusa stare and a downturned mouth. When Mammy saw us looking she smiled but her eyes were sad and she hugged us both tightly.That summer, we visited Granny for the first time. Daddy didn’t want to. We’d heard them talking them through the thin be...

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“Carson Kelly's final tour” by Isobel Tynan

Submitted to Contest #110

Then We have plenty of time, Carson said, with that crocodile smile, as he pulled me through the door of his hotel suite and into his tight sandalwood and brylcreem embrace. His lecture notes, the printed slide deck and my  first chapter which he’d promised to read, spilled from the manila folder I was carrying and scattered over the deep-pile carpet. Leave it, he urged, hurrying me onto the bed with its pristine gleam of sharply cornered sheets and festoon of puffed-up pillows and velvet throws. After, I pulled the tangled sheet ar...

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