Eamonn Furey is a writer from the North of Ireland whose fiction has appeared in All Your Stories magazine, The Argyle Literary Magazine, The Galway Review, The Bath Flash Fiction Anthology, Close to the Bone magazine, The Raven Review, and The First Light Anthology. Writing under the pen name Joseph Gatz, he has also been published in Flash Fiction magazine.

His work explores the power of concise storytelling, blending atmosphere, character, and emotional depth.

In 2026, he was shortlisted for the Kate O’Riordan Prize for Short Fiction at the Kenmare Literary Festival, recognising his growing contribution to contemporary Irish writing.

The Drowning Season

The morning sunshine had filled Martin with a sense of unease. As midday approached, he sat at the kitchen table and took a last drag from his cigarette. His wife’s absence had deprived him of the security of routine. He felt unmoored.

Among the jumble of memory magnets adorning the fridge, a seashell from Tyrella beach perched between an Andalusian bullfighter, and the Eiffel tower. It was on Tyrella that he had first met Cathy. A glued together picture frame of their wedding day and a crack in the glass of the back door, remained as souvenirs of their more volatile days.

Although unburdened by nostalgia, the spectre of his past transgressions had begun to visit him in the slow draw of the evenings. It made him restless, and intemperate. He had developed a selfish form of anger too, a bitterness almost.

Why was Cathy in the hospice and not him?

He smoked, yet it was his wife who had the cancer.

In the hallway a shaft of sunlight forced its way past him through the open front door. It illuminated his dry cleaned-suit, which Cathy had left hanging in cellophane above a polished pair of shoes. At the gate he paused momentarily at the For Sale sign, then turned to follow his own long shadow towards the bus stop by the canal. At the water’s edge a nest of empty beer cans, below a missing life buoy ring, reminded him that the drowning season had begun.