[Short Story] Beachcombing | YA Dark Fantasy
The sea keeps its secrets, until it doesn’t.
The tide rolls in, slow and inevitable, and sometimes it leaves something unexpected behind.
A while back, I found myself thinking about that feeling we get when life shifts under our feet. Not in big cinematic moments, but in the quiet spaces where we think nothing remarkable is happening. Those dusty summers, those long afternoons, those strange in-between years when we’re not quite who we were, and not yet who we’re becoming. Everyone has one, I think. A season where everything changed without announcing itself.
That thought became a story.
My short YA dark fantasy story, Beachcombing, went live recently at Altered Reality Magazine, and I’m honestly still grinning like I’ve just stepped on a perfect piece of sea glass. It follows Owen, a boy spending the summer with his grieving grandfather on a grey English beach, where he digs up something sharp and ancient that cuts deeper than skin. What happens next is strange, a little eerie, and threaded with the quiet ache of trying to grow into yourself when the world keeps insisting you don’t fit.
If you’re drawn to coming-of-age stories with a speculative twist, seaside melancholy, or transformations that creep up slowly before they bloom, I’d love for you to give it a read.
Read the story here: Beachcombing. (Free to read online.)