Whispers from the Wreck
On a coastline where the gulls forget to land, a storm gathers like a rumor at dusk. I came to measure the pulse of the sea, to count the seconds between thunder and the old wreck that slumbers in kelp and shadow. They say ships vanish there, not into the deep, but into memory—the way a name disappears from a page.
My lamp carved a halo in the brackish water as I descended. The hull loomed, a ribcage of rust, a mouthful of rivets that bled sea-glass. In the hold, the air tasted of iron and salt. An echo moved through the timbers, not a sound, but a presence that saw me and did not blink.
“Come closer, listener,” a voice whispered, not from above but from within the wood. “We waited for a witness.”
The whispers grew, not loud, but intimate—like someone leaning close to spill a horrifying truth only I could hear. They spoke of a night when the sea turned silver, when a captain cried out for mercy and the ship answered with a sigh that sank every buoy in the harbor. The logs in a chest told the rest in a ledger of names—names that no longer belong to the living.
With each touch of the chest, the water around me coiled into familiar shapes: a captain’s hat drifting in the current, a lantern glow that never fully dies, a rope that remembers every knot it ever tied. The ghost crew asked for one last thing: remember us, speak our names, carry our secrets to shore so the wreck won’t be forgotten. The choice pressed on me like a weight around the throat.
- Keep the tale to yourself and lose your own breath in the telling.
- Release the names to the dawn, and let the sea claim what you owe.
- Honor the memory by returning to the surface with their whisper stitched into your own heartbeat.
When I surfaced, the lighthouse beam cut through fog like a blade. The shore looked no different, and yet the night felt heavier, as if the ocean had poured a portion of its sorrow into me. I woke with the sound of sea-salted laughter in my ears and a new rhythm in my steps—the cadence of someone who has learned to listen at the edge of the world. The whispers remain, I am certain, not in memory alone but in every breath I draw when the wind hoists its cold banner over the water.