The Lighthouse Keeper's Inventory

He keeps a ledger of the things the sea returns: a child's blue shoe, a hymnal swollen shut, the brass clasp from a suitcase no one claims. Each item numbered, dated, set on the sill to dry into its own small archaeology.

The lamp turns. The lamp turns. The lamp turns. Above him, a wheel of light goes out to look for ships and comes back empty-handed, like a polite guest who has knocked on every door of the dark and found no one home.

He has forgotten the names of his wives, but remembers the exact weight of fog in October, how it presses against the glass with the patience of something that has nowhere else to be.

Once, a gull built a nest inside the foghorn. He let the eggs hatch before he sounded the warning. The ships, that season, sailed by feel — and none of them, he notes in the ledger, ever came to harm.