Fiction

by Scribe Leaf Library · 1 min read · 0 views

The light had turned every forty seconds for thirty-one years, and Marta had counted every one of them from her chair by the window. Tonight the automation crew was coming to install the new system, the one that ran on a satellite signal and needed no one to climb the two hundred and six steps at dusk. She had already packed her one bag. She had already written her name, one last time, in the logbook that no one would read again. She climbed anyway. Habit, she told herself, though she knew it was something closer to love. At the top the lamp turned patiently, indifferent to her presence, the way it had always been, the way it would go on being tomorrow without her hand ever touching the gears. She sat with it until the sky greyed at the edges. Below, the boats that had trusted this light for three decades moved home without knowing a woman had said goodbye to a room made of glass and grief and forty-second turns. When the engineers arrived at seven, they found the logbook open to a blank page, and beside it, a single line: "It was never really mine to keep. Just mine to tend." They installed the new system by noon. The light kept turning, forty seconds exactly, the way it always had — the way it always would, with or without her.