Anchorlight
He walked the cliff path, chasing memories that weren’t his. A coin left behind. A compass pointing nowhere. A plaque whose name time had chewed away. Forgotten things called to him.
That’s when he saw her.
Barefoot. A chain around her ankle. An anchor resting near the edge.
She didn’t look at him.
“You come here often?” he asked.
“No one ever asks,” she said.
Her voice was old. Not her age. Something quieter. Like sea glass rubbed smooth.
Her dress was wrong for the wind. She stood still, too still, like a memory someone left behind. Like a photograph.
“I collect stories,” he said. “Pieces of people. Things time tried to bury.”
She looked at him then. Her eyes held the ocean. Storms. Loss.
“I wore yellow once. Had a piano with one broken key. I loved a man who never came back from sea.”
The chain rattled faintly as she shifted.
He stepped closer. “You mattered. You still do. I don’t have to know your name to know that.”
She looked down. The chain had vanished.
The anchor was gone.
Her shape had gone translucent at the edges. The air shimmered where she stood.
She smiled. “He never came. But you did.”
Then she rose, slow and silent, dissolving upward into cloud light.
He stood alone on the cliff.
Only the circle in the grass remained.
Only the story and the low silence.
He pressed a hand to his chest.
She hadn’t been alive.
Just waiting to be seen.