My name is Morwenna Brightwood. I live in a lighthouse on the coast of Portland, Maine. I own a notebook with two columns. The left column is headed PROBABLY NOTHING. The right column is headed CONFIRMED NOTHING.
Something arrived at my door last week that has moved several items out of the left column entirely.
I am a practical person. When something happens that should not happen, you write it down. When the wind through the window frame resolves, just for a moment, into something that sounds like your name, you write it down. You label it acoustics and you move on. You save your work. You argue with landlords using clause numbers. You keep the notebook.
You do not stand at the window for longer than is reasonable.
Most of the time.
The sea has always been strange to me. Not frightening. Not beautiful in the way people mean when they say a thing is beautiful and want you to agree. Strange in the way a word goes strange when you have said it too many times, until the meaning slips sideways and you are left with just the shape of it. I grew up hearing the tide in my sleep. I know the sound of the water hitting the rocks below the lighthouse the way I know my own heartbeat, which is to say: I notice it most when it changes.
It has been changing.
There is an ache behind my sternum. I have had it my whole life, and I have been labeling it anxiety for as long as I have had words for things. I have two psychology degrees. I have a very healthy relationship with rational explanation. I have a free wellness podcast bookmarked on my phone that recommends breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth, and I have done this in the hallway of my own home with one hand pressed flat against the plaster wall because the ache had a direction to it, and the direction was toward the window at the end of the hall, and beyond the window was the Atlantic.
I wrote that down. Left column.
Then the letter came.
It appeared on my doorstep on a Saturday night, just past nine. No postage. No return address. My name on the front in handwriting I did not recognize, in ink that looked older than it had any right to be.
I will not tell you what it said. Not yet. I will tell you that it was written on parchment that should not have been warm to the touch, and that the final line has not stopped pressing itself into the back of my thoughts since I read it. I will tell you that I have read it many times now, and each time the ink looks darker than the time before.
I will also tell you that the night after it arrived, I saw a figure standing at the edge of the rocks below the lighthouse. Tall. Still. Watching from the dark with the particular patience of someone who has been waiting a very long time and has decided that waiting a little longer costs nothing. I could not see his face. I could see that he wore a mask, and that he was dressed in a way that did not belong to this century, or possibly any century I could name.
I wrote that down too. Right column.
My sister Ava says I am the most stubborn person she has ever met, and she means it as a complaint. I take it as a compliment. Stubbornness has served me well. It keeps me from looking too closely at the things I am not ready to name yet. Things like why Seamus, who has known me since I was small enough to fit under his arm, sometimes looks at me the way a man looks at a weather front he has been watching build for twenty years. Things like what he knows about the night they found me.
I was found on the beach below this lighthouse. I was an infant. There was no one else on the shore.
I have always known this. I have never asked the questions that follow from it. I think I am about to start.
Something is coming. I do not know what it is yet.
I am keeping notes.
If you want to know what I find, subscribe to the newsletter. I will write to you once a month, from the lighthouse, and I will tell you what I can.
Well. Almost everything.
Some things are still in the left column. But the right column is no longer empty.
Morwenna Brightwood Brightwood Lighthouse, Portland, Maine
--- Tales from the Tide is a monthly newsletter written from the perspective of Morwenna Brightwood, protagonist of the upcoming Morwenna Chronicles series by Lisa A. Moore. Subscribe below to receive her letters directly.
Written by Lisa A. Moore