Finn and the Night Loom

Finn woke before the gulls. The house by the cliff kept a small, private hush in the early hour: a stitched hush, the kind you could smooth with two fingers. He found it in the cracks of the floorboards where the kettle's foot used to tap, in the way the curtains folded back from the window, and most of all in the loom that hung by the high, salt-streaked pane. The loom was older than the chimney and older than the laddered crates that kept the shop half tidy. It pulsed once each night with a thin, silver rhythm and then the village would breathe easier. Mothers would tuck socks around tiny ankles, fishermen would fold their nets with patient hands, and the little ones would sigh as if a warm shawl had been laid over their chests.

Finn wound his small hands around a spool of ordinary wool while Aunt Lark poured tea so black it remembered the storm. She smelled of lavender and old wool and the sea in a way that seemed to fit Finn like a mitten. Her fingers moved with the kinds of memory Finn could only watch—swift, exact, the motions of someone who could set crooked edges right with a single stitch.

"Morning," she said, but her voice had the careful tilt of someone listening for something not yet there.

Finn glanced toward the loom. It should have been humming low and steady, a cradle for the night's silver. Instead the threads caught the light and looked tired, as if the moon had taken a day off.

"Did you hear it?" he asked.

Aunt Lark set the teapot down with a soft clink. "Not last night, little star. It sputtered like a candle with a draft. I thought perhaps the shuttle needed its oil, or perhaps a knot had gotten into the weft. Go tend the harbor lines today, Finn. Keep your eyes on the tide and your ears on the wind. Old things sometimes whisper before they break."

Finn pulled his shirt on—his favorite was the one with a small patch of a paper boat stitched over the elbow—and pushed open the door. Outside, the village breathed in long, slow waves. Smoke rose in thin breaths from chimneys. A cart rolled by with rounds of bread that smelled of butter and salt. The sea itself held a low color, not its usual bright flash but a soft, thin tin sound that made Finn's chest feel as if someone had tucked it a little too tight.

He walked to the edge of the quay where the tide left wet fingers and tiny shells, and he tried singing the lullaby his mother used to hum. He remembered the first line like a necklace pulled from a drawer—warm and familiar—but the last notes frayed in his throat. Beyond the cove, the cliffhouse where the loom lived looked less like a home and more like an open palm that had been emptied.