House by the Sea

They hang like a beaded curtain in a fortune teller’s parlor, each buoy a bauble from the sea’s own trove— sun-faded, barnacle-bitten, unstrung from nets that once strained tides for omens. Now they sway in the wind, rattling secrets and guarding the doorway to elsewhere. Who dwells behind the curtain— a castaway witch, perhaps, who brews fog in mason jars and weaves seaweed into capes? A fisherman’s widow still waiting for him to return from his final fateful voyage? Or maybe no one at all, just wind and longing and salt-stung light curling around a chipped enamel cup. Or maybe an infinitely unfolding maze that traps who enters in eternal twilight where each corridor breathes with the hush of retreating tides, walls papered in kelp and longing, ancient air that smells of old shipwrecks and unanswered questions. Some say you can hear a voice calling your name—not as it is, but as it was before you forgot what you came looking for. And yet the house remains, perched above the tide line, porch sagging like an old shoulder, paint peeled by salt and time. Through warped windowpanes the ebbing light still flickers— not warm, exactly, but not unwelcoming. Seagulls gliding in a gyre. A foghorn’s distant intonation. And always, the buoys tapping, as if to say: You’re closer than you think.