The Lighthouse

by BRITTNEY CORRIGAN

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Watch.

Listen.

The lighthouse.

What washes ashore.

The lighthouse is something remarkable.

Remarkable in itself, but also for what arrives.

Sometimes what arrives is not unusual. A nautilus shell or a sea star. 

Sometimes what arrives is a curiosity, especially for its unbattered condition. Yesterday, a sunflower with all its seeds. Not one missing.

The path from the lighthouse to shore is a series of sculpted steps threaded down the rocky cliffside. When the lighthouse was young, an artist lined the steps with a rail carved from driftwood.

The keeper keeps more than the lighthouse. She also keeps a logbook of all the unexpected arrivals on its shore. That nothing ate the seeds before the sunflower found the ocean, and that nothing found the seeds as the sunflower floated in the sea, is a sort of miracle. But it’s not the only one. 

The rail is polished smooth from the salty air and the keeper’s wrinkled hands. Each morning, after tending the light, the keeper descends to the shore to see what has arrived overnight. The lighthouse exists to help ships navigate the ocean. They cannot find their own way, as toothed whales do. The keeper doubts what washes ashore comes from the passing ships. She worked aboard ships, and she has never seen any of these entities in their cargo holds or on their decks. What arrives comes from somewhere else.

The lighthouse keeper is the last lighthouse keeper and soon there will be no lighthouse keepers at all. The lighthouses no longer need the company of people, or daily tending, or anyone to hold their secrets and ghosts. The keeper wonders who will bear witness to what she has seen in her many years at the lighthouse. She believes it matters that she has watched the migrations of whales and the brilliant hues of sunrise and long ships on the horizon and sometimes a Fata Morgana hovering in the sky where the ocean disappears over the curve of Earth. The keeper feels she is at the heart of the galaxy. When her bones creak with weariness, she sits at the window—the sill lined with cones from trees that do not grow nearby—and watches the beam of the lighthouse reach into the dark. 

In her solitude, the lighthouse keeper is an attentive witness. The waves teem with miraculous beings and the cast-iron stairs in the lighthouse tower creak with invisible footsteps on quiet nights. The keeper knows things that those who have never been lighthouse keepers will never know, would never believe. She has felt breath on her neck as she polishes the lens and has heard the drift of soft melodies as she stands on the catwalk and stares into the fog. The lighthouse has seen hurricanes and also shipwrecks, because even the best-tended and most well-located lighthouse cannot avoid the will of a storm. Every lighthouse watches over grief and ghosts, what splinters and what remains. And when the hurricanes come ashore in their spirals of wind and rain, the keeper hunkers down and hopes that the lighthouse will survive the lashing. Lighthouses with their masonry and taper are built to withstand storms, but not all of them do. This lighthouse has weathered many years. The keeper knows there must be an end to everything: her time as keeper, this lighthouse with its clockwork and gears, perhaps even the sea itself. But she allows for the possibility of the infinite. If not this lighthouse, if not the keeper herself, then a state of being that resembles that moment in the hurricane’s eye when something godlike and golden hovers in the eerie stillness of air.

Every storm both shatters and awes. This morning the sea is calm after the overnight squalls, and the sky stretches on for what seems like forever, only the smallest wisps of clouds drifting across an unbroken blue. It is one of those postcard days with the sun sparkling on the water and the lighthouse framed against a deep cobalt backdrop. Seagulls fall in and out of that frame like small angels, familiar voices rising from their hollow-boned throats. The path from the lighthouse to the sand is damp from the storm, and though eager to see what has washed ashore in its wake, the keeper navigates her way cautiously. Her linen dress, pinstriped and ruffled at the shirtsleeves and hem, drags against the rocks as she descends the steps. Errant gray hairs escape the white bonnet that protects her face from the sun. The lighthouse keeper takes her job seriously, and she dresses the part even though there is no one to see her, and there are more practical clothes that she could wear. She looks to be from another century entirely, as if she is playing pretend, but there is something about the lighthouse that demands she caretake it in the manner it prefers, in the way that reminds it of when it was young. The lighthouse and the keeper resist the inevitable automation that awaits them, when they will no longer need each other. But the keeper knows the lighthouse will still be needed, long after no one needs her. As she makes her way down the path, her hand gripping the driftwood rail, the keeper can see something large on the beach, but she cannot yet make out what it is. As the keeper descends, a falcon whirls in the blueness above her, and she turns her head back toward the lighthouse to watch as the bird curves in its dive toward the ground, fixed on whatever small creature scurries below. Then the keeper focuses again on what the sea has brought her today. As she draws closer, she is sure it was once living and breathing as she is but isn’t living and breathing any longer. A sleek, gray mound of animal lies unmoving among the broken bodies of sand dollars and urchins. 

Last night, the lighthouse keeper dreamed a galaxy had washed ashore. Not a miniature galaxy—the kind that could fit neatly between the rocky cliffside and the tideline—but a galaxy thousands of light-years wide containing many billions of stars. The keeper knows dreams are expansive, like the universe, and that anything can fit inside them. Inside the galaxy’s whorling arms were stars and planets and asteroids and comets and moons and nebulae and dust and black holes and gravity and dark matter. Inside the galaxy was the ocean and its teeming life and fleets of ships navigating its surface and the remarkable lighthouse and the wondrous objects that had washed onto the lighthouse’s shore. And in the dream, the keeper descended the steps from the lighthouse that was not in the galaxy to the lighthouse that was in the galaxy, and between those two lighthouses which were the same lighthouse the keeper spread out her arms and reached for both lenses at once, though she feared that if she touched the twin lanterns, which were the same lantern, she would disappear, becoming herself that infinitely distant singularity that lies at the center of every black hole. The lighthouse keeper remembers that dream now as she steps from the carved staircase onto the rocky shore and moves toward the unmoving animal. A dolphin, which must have become stranded during the storm. The dolphin is lying on its belly, tail pointed toward the ocean, which is retreating toward low tide. Its dorsal fin droops, and its two pectoral fins splay out on either side. The keeper approaches slowly, though it is clear that the dolphin is no longer alive. She kneels in the wet sand beside its head, feels the painful crush of broken shells beneath her kneecaps. She places her hand on the animal’s rostrum, runs her fingers across its smooth skin up to its blowhole, then down again. For a moment, the keeper lowers her head and touches it to the rounded expanse between the dolphin’s eyes. This is not the first death on the lighthouse’s shore. If the keeper could choose her own place of death, the lighthouse’s shore is what she would choose, too. This particular death is not as easily lifted as a sunflower or a pinecone or a waterlogged honeycomb of quieted bees. The lighthouse is isolated, and the keeper is alone, and the dolphin’s body is large on the sunswept shore. The keeper understands the dolphin will decay here. Its flesh will be consumed by birds and beasts, and its bones will scatter across the shore until they return to the sea. Perhaps by that time, the keeper will no longer be at the lighthouse, and the lens will rotate without her, and the ships that pass will not know that something both common and miraculous has happened within their reach. The lighthouse keeper stands, turning her gaze from ocean to dolphin and back up to the lighthouse which stands sentinel in the sun. Then she gathers up the apron of her skirt and begins to fill it with small rocks and shells. As the morning orbits toward afternoon, the keeper places the tokens around the body of the dolphin, starting at the tip of its nose and spiraling outward until the dolphin is the fulcrum of its own galaxy, its unbeating heart a central star. The lighthouse keeper closes her eyes. The dolphin’s heart echolocates, expands across the sand, reaching for the celestial body of the lighthouse and the ocean that is light-years away. Standing in the shore-bound spiral, the keeper listens to the dolphin’s quiet heart. Feels the lighthouse. Watches the light.