The Wind That Carries Screams
On the edge of the harbor town, the wind never simply passes by. It gathers, it moans, it collects voices from the drowned and the forgotten, and in the moments between dusk and waking, it chooses a listener.
I have learned to listen with more than ears. My job, once a timid archivist of timetables and bells, became a vocation of listening to what the air wears on its breath. The first time the wind spoke, it was a whisper—the name of a girl who vanished years ago—carried across the churchyard like a thread of smoke.
“We keep the memory of the missing, so the sea does not forget us,” the wind seemed to murmur, and I pressed my ear to the old brass vent, tasting salt and rust on my tongue.
Tonight the wind grows heavier, a pressure behind every door, a tremor in the shingles. I follow the sound along the outer stairs to the lighthouse where fog gathers and refuses to lift. Each step I take seems to echo in some other lifetime, each window a lens into a memory not my own.
What the wind reveals
- A name etched in mist, appearing and vanishing with the gusts.
- Footsteps that move only when the air shifts, leading toward a door that should stay closed.
- A chorus of voices repeating a single vow: solve the missing, free the trapped.
- A rope coil in the keeper’s room that tightens when a scream nears its peak.
In the keeper’s journal, I find a warning scrawled in ink that has salted itself to the page: do not listen to the wind if you wish to stay yourself. Yet listening is all I have left. The dawn will not come until the last scream has found its home, until the air no longer aches with the names that the sea refuses to forget.
“When the wind finally holds its breath, the town will hear what they have not dared to hear—the truth behind every door,”
By morning, the town is quiet, as if the gusts have swallowed their voices. I press my lips to the latch of the lighthouse keeper’s chest and hear, not a scream but a single, ordinary breath: mine. The wind carries it down the coast, away from this cliff, and I realize some stories do not end; they drift, weather-worn, into the next night.