The Lighthouse Kite

You arrive in Seafern Cove with salt on your lips and grit in your shoes, the kind that hides between your toes and makes you run to the water just to wash it away. Gulls tilt and gawk above the harbor, and the lighthouse on the cliff watches everything with its wide glass eye. Its white sides are sun-chalked and salt-bitten. When the light spins at dusk, it hums in your ribs. People say you can feel it even with your eyes closed.

Your mother’s bakery faces the quay. She stacks shortbread like golden tiles and dusts sugar that floats through the open door like a soft snow. "No climbing that lighthouse until the festival, promise?" she says, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear with a floury finger.

"Promise," you say, though your eyes have already measured the hill, the iron gate, the steps that curl like a shell.

Seafern Cove hums with nets being fixed, oars being oiled, flags being painted for Founders’ Lantern Night. Children chalk fish on the cobbles. A retired keeper in a faded blue coat leans outside a small shop crammed with coils and floats; a bell dings whenever his door opens. A board in the window shows knots tied in neat pairs and names in tidy handwriting. The bell marks time with the tide.

You build a kite from linen scraps and driftwood splinters smoothed by the sea. Your fingers know the patience of thread and the certainty of a square knot. On the dune, your kite leaps, then drinks the breeze. The string hums in your palm. When you let out more line, the hum turns into a whisper.

It says your name.

You glance around; no one stands close enough to trick you. The whisper changes, shaped by the angle of the kite and the direction of the wind. You shift your wrist. The sound grows curious, like a question.

"You talk, don’t you?" you whisper back, eyes on the white house on the cliff. The lighthouse lens glitters, winks, goes on turning like a heartbeat.

The day slips by with the smell of tar and soap and the knock of masts. You walk home trailing your kite like a tame cloud. The bell on the retired keeper’s door chimes as someone goes in, and you catch a few words as you pass: "Weather’s been steady," says his voice, calm as a long breath. "Until it isn’t." You look back, and he lifts two fingers in a greeting that’s almost a salute.

That night, waves breathe, lanterns sway, and your kite hangs from a nail by your window, string coiled like a sleeping snail. You sleep with your hand on the spool. In your dream the lighthouse lens is a bright moon that pulls you like a tide.