Fog at the Lighthouse

The lighthouse had not needed a keeper for thirty years, not really. The lamp turned itself and the foghorn sounded on its own. But the coastal authority liked someone on the island in winter, to check the generators and log the weather, and Astrid had wanted to be somewhere no one could find her.

The island was a mile of rock and heather with a white tower at one end and a boathouse at the other. Every Tuesday, a fisherman named Erik brought supplies over from the mainland in a small blue boat: bread, coffee, tinned fish, diesel for the generator and the occasional newspaper several days old.

He was a quiet man, weathered, with a short grey beard and hands that never stopped working. He unloaded the crates, asked if she needed anything, and left. For the first month that was the whole of their conversation.

Then the fog came. It rolled in one Tuesday as he was unloading, thick and white and silent, and within minutes they could not see the water from the jetty.

'I can't cross in this,' Erik said. 'I'll wait it out in the boathouse.'

'Don't be silly,' said Astrid. 'Come up to the tower.'

They climbed the spiral stairs to the keeper's room, where the stove was lit and the kettle was always on. The foghorn sounded every thirty seconds, deep and mournful, shaking the windows. They drank coffee and talked, and he told her the names of all the birds and all the rocks, and she found herself laughing for the first time in months.

The fog did not lift that day. Or that night.