HERE THERE BE RUIN
Starlight Cove, 1923
The Starlight Cove Almanac of 1923 listed the wishing well right between the tide schedules and a recipe for salt-cured salmon.
The Wishing Well (center square): established 1887.
Do not approach after dusk.
Do not lower children by rope.
Do not, under any circumstances, make a wish.
The last warning was the only one anyone ever questioned. You could understand the first two. The island had its share of moss-slicked stones, sudden fogs, and creepy forest...
But why would a wishing well advise against wishing? The almanac offered no explanation. It never had. Even the founding families refused to talk.
Vera Marshall read the entry the night after the funeral, sitting at her dead husband's desk with a glass of something she hadn't bothered to identify. The salmon recipe was on the facing page. Harold loved salmon.
She closed the book.
The wishing well was three blocks from the house they'd shared for forty years. Through the cedar-lined square where fishermen played checkers and the widow Pumphrey sold lavender sachets from a cart. On the edge of those woods. The odd woods that led to the other side.
The well itself was unremarkable. Waist-high, circled by a ring of sea-smoothed pebbles someone had arranged long ago. A wooden sign hung from the post of the rusted crank:
HERE THERE BE RUIN.
Someone added, in smaller letters beneath, she means it.
Vera stood at the edge and looked down.
The water was black. Non reflective, pitch dark. A wafted cloud of salt & mystery rose from the depths as she peered down.
Vera had a penny in her pocket. She always had a penny. Harold teased her for collecting them. He called her his copper-pocket girl. She took it out and held it over the water.
“I know you're there,” she said. Her voice echoed in the well. “The almanac says not to. Which means someone wrote the almanac knowing what's down here.” She paused. “I'm not afraid.”
I am more afraid of continuing than of whatever this is. She murmured.
The penny fell from her fingers.
It did not splash. The coin simply descended into the dark without sound. Swallowed by the darkness.
Then a breath from below. An aroma of brine sharpened. Beneath it something warm and alive, like the inside of a kelp forest in late summer.
The tentacle that rose from the water was the color of deep-sea jade. Then it flashed purple. Iridescent in the grey October light. It moved the way smoke moves when there's no wind. Purposeful. Curious. It extended, up and over the stone lip, and lay itself across the wet rock like an offered hand.
Vera looked at it.
It was, she thought, very beautiful. She hadn’t expected that.
“Sit,” said a voice from the water. The voice was low and shaped by years of speaking to itself. “You'll hurt your back leaning over like that.”
“You speak,” she asked.
“Constantly,” said the voice. “To myself, mostly. The fish don't answer. The coins don't answer. You're the first in…” a pause, as it calculated, “twenty years who's spoken first.”
Vera looked at the tentacle still resting on the lip of the well. It had not moved. She thought of Harold's hands on the nets. “Twenty years,” she said.
“A woman named Myrtle. She was desperate.” Another pause. “The sign is mine. I put it up in 1890 when I realized I couldn't bear any more of them. The people who come on a lark. Toss coins without meaning it. Laugh when they lean over the edge and then run away if I dare move. I couldn't bear the running.”
“You wanted to keep people away,” Vera said.
“I wanted to keep the careless lookeeloos away.” The water shifted. A second tentacle rose. This one looped lazily over the first, the way a cat drapes itself over the arm of a chair. “The ones who need something, they don't run. Fear is a filter. A very efficient filter."
The fog thickened. It pressed in from the harbor, carrying the smell of low tide and ferry fuel. That sea salt lived in the wood of every building on the island.
“My husband drowned,” Vera said. “Three months ago. The Molly Jean. They just recovered the boat.”
“I know,” said Merelda. “I felt it.” She did not explain.
Vera looked at where the penny had fallen and was gone. “Can you bring him back.”
“No. That's not a talent I have.”
“Then what do you have.”
The tentacle on the stone lip moved. Slowly. It curled toward Vera's hand where it rested. It stopped an inch away. Waiting with patience…
Connection with another soul. Merelda’s voice washed through Vera. “I have listened to this harbor for one hundred and forty years. I know its rhythms. I know which storms will come and which will pass north. I know which fishermen are worth worrying about and which ones the sea has memorized.” A long pause, the sound of deep water moving against stone. “I know that the Molly Jean’s captain died of a weakened rope in a sudden squall, not recklessness. I know he looked at the stars before he went under. I know his last thought was of you. He loved you.”
Vera’s throat tightened. She had not cried at the funeral. She was out of tears, she thought.
“Why are you telling me this.”
“Because you asked what I have.” The tentacle retracted. “And…because you sat down. Everyone else who ever heard my voice, they ran. You sat down.”
The fog ate the woods. They vanished behind thier curtain. The harbor lights were pearls in grey cotton, and the smell of the cedar trees moved over the salt.
Vera sat on the wishing well where Merelda had waited for someone to stop running. She didn't know how long she stayed. Long enough for the cold to move through her coat. Her fingers a breath away from the tentacle on the lip.
When she finally stood, her knees ached and her eyes were dry. “Same time tomorrow?” she said.
The water in the well moved once. Vera took that for yes.
She came back the next day, and the day after, through the cedar-smelling fog and the grey Pacific rain. She did not throw another coin. She sat on the lip and talked.
On the coldest mornings, when frost edged the sea-smoothed pebbles and the harbor was a whisper of grey, Vera brought two hot cups of tea. She always left one on the stone lip. It was a ridiculous gesture.
The cup steamed in the cold air, and Merelda rose high enough to watch the steam curl and disappear.
That was, Vera thought, what friendship was. Not the filling of a hole, but the gesture understood on the other side.
An extended story from a prompt from Prompt Response
Yes! Can’t wait to read this!
Awwww, this is so beautiful. I love the way restraint is doing so much work here -- so much is spoken and felt deeply between the words. very well done, dude.