The Cable That Remembers

We lower steel into a blue that has no morning, only the slow pulse of pressure and plankton. The ship’s winch sings like a throat clearing, and the cable rises, black with salt and years.

In its sheath, a river of light has been whispering— dates, births, arguments, a laugh in a kitchen— compressed into a hair-thin glass that never saw the faces it carried.

We splice by hand, a small surgery on the quiet. A gull circles, misreading us for a storm. Below, the seafloor keeps its archives of anchors, bones of voyages that refused to resurface.

When we let it go, the line slides back to its darkness, a long vowel returning to a sentence. I watch the wake erase our knots of attention, and think how memory travels without a body.