Echoes from the Wreck

In a harbor where fog clings to the rigging like a second breath, the old lighthouse’s glow flickered over rusted hulls and rumor. After the storm, the sea wore a glassy surface and kept its old curses close, a memory leaking into every tide. A ship that never truly sank, some said, drifted somewhere between the dark and a memory that refused to die.

Tonight I followed that memory, stepping onto the jetty with a heartbeat louder than the sea. The wreck rose from the void, a skeletal city of iron and planks, its ribs naked to the moon. Each gust carried a whisper, a name long forgotten by the living but not by water—names that hung in my ears as if banners in a storm.

“We did not drown; we dissolved into echoes, and now the sea remembers us.”

The first touch was a pale finger of cold on my glove, a handprint pressed onto the hull as if the ship herself wished to be touched. The whispers swelled: clanging boots on a deck that should be ashore, a bell tolling without a bell ringer. It was not fear that held me; it was a rumor I could not resist—the rumor that the wreck would offer a voice to anyone patient enough to listen.

From the deck, relics surfaced like messages from a drowned city, each item telling a story that belonged to a vanished crew:

• a compass that never points north, only toward memory
• a captain’s hat stiff with salt yet somehow smiling
• a sextant etched with initials that rearrange themselves when watched from the corner of an eye
• a brass whistle that sings through the water in a language all its own

As I laid the last artifact upon the harbor stones, the voices settled into a patient hum. The wreck did not plead for rescue; it offered an audience, a chance to be heard one more time before the sea forgot again. I did not promise to return, only to listen until the tide shifted and the whispers found a new ear among the living—or perhaps a new chapter among the dead.