The Vigil

The lighthouse had no name, only a number — Station 34 — but Maren had long ago stopped thinking of it as anything other than her bones. The tower was her spine, the spiral stairs her ribs, and the great Fresnel lens at the crown was her single unblinking eye, sweeping the dark water in measured rotations like a pulse she no longer chose.

Forty-one years she had tended it. She could not remember applying for the post. There had been paperwork, certainly — she recalled the weight of the pen, the particular shade of government blue — but the memory of choosing to come here had settled into the bedrock beneath conscious thought, the way certain griefs become geological.

The island sat three miles off the mainland coast, though "coast" suggested a continuity the landscape didn't earn. The shore was basalt rubble, black and volcanic, heaped by some ancient tantrum of the earth. On clear days she could see the village rooftops across the water, small as scattered teeth. On bad days there was only the fog and the metronomic sweep of her light.

She woke each afternoon at four. She ate her supper of tinned fish and dark bread while the sun descended. She climbed the one hundred and twelve steps to the lantern room — she had counted them once, decisively, in her first week, and refused to count again — and she lit the light. Not literally, of course; the mechanism was electric now, automated since 1987. But she performed the ritual because the ritual was the architecture of her sanity.