TBG+S Writing Commission | Cathy Sweeney, 'Nostos'

A boy sets out from home. It is a long and dangerous journey to the next land but he is prepared. He has a cardboard suitcase packed with bread his mother made him, and a knife his father gave him, a poem his sister wrote him and a warm jumper his grandmother knit. The case is tied securely with string. And besides, the sea is calm and blue and bright, and if he squints he can see a mountain rising on the horizon. So, he walks out onto the water. He is young, and everything is possible. The cold bubbles around his toes and whitens his skin.

Far away, in a church, his mother is weeping. But the boy cannot hear her. He is too far away and the waves are churning. He keeps walking, closing his eyes and lips against the froth of the crests, sucking air in through his nose, pushing his body towards the mountain shrouded in mist. The boy is afraid. He is afraid if he dies, no one will know. His mother will think he was too busy to write, his father will say he died in a fight, his sister will believe he hated poetry, his grandmother will stop knitting. And now the wind is going crazy. A long time ago something happened to it and it never recovered. But the boy doesn’t care about that, he thinks only of the future, and opening his mouth he shouts as loud as he can.

Taking pity, the wind swallows the boy’s words into its enormous lungs and bellows them back all the way to the city. The wind is tired of stories of sirens and cave-dwelling monsters and whirlpools, but still it retains a place in its heart for children.

But the city is too far away, and overnight it has changed.

Years ago all the salted tears cried by mothers dried on their faces, fell down into the dark streets and rolled around, making a music of sorts, the kind you might hear if the core of the earth burst opened and flowers sprang out instead of lava. A strange sound that drowned out the rain and the mountains, the trees and the wind.

The boy is tired. He lies down on the water, the handle of his suitcase clutched tightly in his hand. Night drops suddenly, a black blanket for the boy to wrap himself in, and soon he is sleeping a sleep interrupted by dreams in which people come and go, some he knows, others he has never seen, then golden towns and golden towers, empires with streets of gold, the school where he had sat on a wooden bench copying letters from a board, his friend calling him to play ball, a crash of timber, sand, concrete, metal and male bodies sweating, a poet with a basket of oranges offering him to take one, alligators, birds, the face of his mother, a mirage called home.

He tosses and turns and when the sun comes up he is a turtle, heavy with shelled out memories but slowly he drifts west and when he reaches the shore his heart is lighter, the salt of the water turning stone to wood, until it is full of the gifts he will bring back someday.

The boy is a man. He finds a job in a canning factory. It doesn’t pay well but it’s a start. He rents a room in a boarding house. One night, a month after he has moved in, he unpacks the battered suitcase he had put at the back of the wardrobe. A tin of tomatoes, a rock from a real volcano, a quote, and a flag. He puts the tin in the press under the sink, the rock and flag on the mantle over the blocked up fireplace, and later that night, a little drunk on bourbon, he posts the quote on social media.

‘Certainly the sweetest sleep is the deepest sleep, when we are almost like the dead, not dreaming anything …’

A girl he likes from work adds a heart emoji.

And now he is walking down a familiar street he cannot remember, staring at cars flying past on the blue Tyrrhenian sea.

Cathy Sweeney is a short story writer and novelist and TBG+S Commissioned Writer 2026. Her fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review and Granta, and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. In 2020, her collection of short stories, Modern Times, was published by The Stinging Fly Press, Dublin, and by W&N, London. Her debut novel Breakdown was published by W&N in January 2024. In 2026, she works on a novel based on the months Oscar Wilde spent in Naples following his release from prison in 1897.

The TBG+S Writing Commission aims to expand ideas around writing about art by inviting Irish writers to create a series of pieces inspired by the exhibitions at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. Since 2015, TBG+S has commissioned innovative Irish writers to respond to each of the exhibitions in the gallery programme, producing a library of thought-provoking written pieces. Printed copies of the these writings are available in the gallery of are available to download from the website.