short fiction · 2026-10-31

The Lighthouse Keeper's Ledger

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

Elias burned the wardrobe first — oak, dovetailed joints, his grandfather's wedding gift to his grandmother. The flame caught slow, then greedy, and the light swept the channel steady for three nights.

The desk went second. His logbooks, the tide charts, the ledger where he'd recorded every barrel of oil delivered since 1873 — all ash now, drifting up the chimney. The light held.

On the fourth night, the bed frame. He slept on the stone floor, wrapped in the keeper's coat, listening to the lens rotate. Tick. Tick. Tick. The mechanism's heartbeat.

The supply ship was two weeks overdue. The radio had coughed static for a month. Somewhere on the mainland, a war had started or ended or simply continued without them.

He found the note in the margin of the 1891 ledger, written in his father's hand: The light is not for the ships. The ships have their own lights now. The light is for the shore — so the shore remembers it is not alone.

Elias fed the stairs to the fire on the sixth night. He climbed down the rope ladder to the gallery, wrapped in wool and soot, and watched the beam cut the dark. The shore did not answer. But it watched back.