The Lighthouse That Kept Getting Letters

Every Thursday, a letter arrived at the lighthouse on Skerry Point, addressed to someone who had never lived there.

Mareth had kept the light for eleven years and had stopped opening them after the third. She stacked them in a biscuit tin instead, and when the tin filled she started a second one, and when that filled she began using the empty flour sack. The name on the envelopes was always the same: A. Bell, Keeper. The handwriting was always the same too — small, careful, slanting slightly uphill, as though the writer were walking against wind.

She asked the supply boat captain about it once. He shrugged and said the mail came from the mainland sorting office and the mainland sorting office came from somewhere else, and that was as far as anyone had ever thought about it.

On the night the storm took the west window, Mareth ran out of lamp oil at half past two. The bulb was gone, the reserve was gone, and there was a trawler out there — she could hear its horn, thin and repeating, the way a person calls a name they're not sure anyone will answer to.

So she burned the letters.

She fed them into the brazier one at a time, and each one caught with a small blue flourish, and the light that came off them was not the color fire makes. It was white. It was steady. It filled the lantern room and poured out through the broken window in a beam so clean the rain seemed to move aside for it.

She read one before it went in. Just one. It said:

Dear Keeper — I don't know your name yet, but I know you'll need these. Burn them when it's bad. I'm sorry I can't send anything more useful. Yours, A. Bell.

The trawler made harbor. In the morning Mareth found the flour sack empty, the tins empty, and a single new envelope on the mat, still damp.

She sat down at the table, took out a sheet of paper, and — because she had eleven years of Thursdays to account for, and because her handwriting had always slanted uphill — began to write.