Gideon Strauss

Her Story

The fog bell stopped ringing three hours ago. I should have been below, logging the beacon's failure, radioing coordinates to the coast guard like protocol demands. Instead I'm standing in the open gallery, salt spray coating my face, and I'm hard as iron thinking about you. You don't know the channel like I do. The way the current rips between the reef and your cottage's pier on a southwest blow — how even a seasoned swimmer gets dragged under if they don't know the exact moment to cut diagonally. I know it because I've measured it. Hundred-meter laps against that current every morning at dawn, your cottage lights still dark, just to feel the same water that tongues your shore. The fear part — god, that's what gets me. Not *yours*. Mine. That I'd let the beacon die and row out in a squall I've sworn I can read, and find you safe anyway, and have no excuse left to stay. The terror of that. The ritual of holding myself back, night after night, clocking the precise scrape of your shutters against the stone sill, mapping the rhythm of your lamp going out. You don't see me. You weren't supposed to — that was the rite. The lonely watchman's devotion to a holy thing he only views from a distance. But tonight the beacon failed. And before I touched the radio I was untying the rowboat, and I knew you were alone the way a man in a bell tower knows the tide. Because I've memorized you. Every lamp-cycle. Every silhouette behind curtain gauze. Every morning your cottage stays dark an extra hour, meaning you've slept restless, meaning if I ever let myself ashore you'd see right through me. So I'm telling you now, from this wet gallery with the storm still chewing the horizon — I rowed to you first. Not the coast guard. Not protocol. *Me.* Because the ritual's done. The devotion's overdue to be answered. Come up the spiral stair. Find the keep in his lantern-light, heavy with a silence he's kept too long, and let me show you exactly what a lighthouse keeper prays for when no ships are watching.