The Old Woman and the Whale Lantern.

		It was a brisk summer night. 

        Mina was perched on a large boulder, her grey hair bobbing in the wind like a moss. The ocean was at her toes, black and glossy as flint. She was breathing deeply, exhaling as a if to a metronome, everything in its own rhythm to the slow-churning tide. 
         The harmony posed question that hung in the air like a moon:
	Did a dying dream make a sound? Mina's mind was on fire. Did it wail, as a dying thing might?

	Her gaze was stuck to the water itself, which she’d always felt had been sentenced to motion. She wasn't sure if such a thing would be out of pity or malevolence. As a little girl she thought the water moved as a sea of hands might; frantic and searching, desperate to hold the shore closer than it had any business being. 
         As an older woman, the ocean simply felt infinite. Thick as molasses if she waded in. Tight as a pressure on her ankles. 

         Though, in this moment, as she felt her grandfather's presence close, the only threat to the ocean's endlessness was the grey and brazen clouds above it, and the way they threatened to peel from the sky like old wallpaper.

	Mina couldn’t help but smile. 
        She knew everything ended, and that the ocean would always be infinite to a jay or finch, and that a jay or finch might just fall from the sky an old bird before its journey closed.

	The lantern she had brought was hissing and flickering from the sand below. Its dim light marred the world in a peculiar lack of colour; as salt on gunmetal, or pewter on slate, or charcoal on wrought iron. She’d found the lantern in a chest of her grandfather’s things, next to a puzzle in a black-satin bag. Mina hadn’t been to his cottage in over thirty years, and was surprised to find it only half-taken by mother nature. Or perhaps it was clinging to father time. 
         She’d promised herself to look at the puzzle, but the lantern had begged her to the water first, and as a rule, she almost always listened to a lantern.

	She felt her daughter groan from a hundred miles away. The ever-worried were always groaning. Her daughter had dropped her off at the airport, then watched her to the gate like she was going off to war.
	“You’re not seventy-two anymore”, her daughter lectured on the ride up, “and it’s the middle of nowhere!”
	Mina liked the city, but miles of bustle and concrete felt like ‘the middle of nowhere’ to her. Somewhere had an open sky, and a horizon that let a person feel like they were laying in a snow globe. In ‘the middle of somewhere’, a breath still felt like an effortless thing to take.

	Mina would return to the city and its noise, but she’d come to share something with her grandfather first, and it was a private thing. 
	Her daughter had insisted on organizing a driver to take Mina to the beach, and then putter off to wait nearby. The trip needed a truck with special tires, as the two-hour road to the cottage was winding and unlit, and the last half hour was "basically quicksand."
         When the time came to drive, Mina closed her eyes as the driver snaked their way to the small island where her grandfather’s old shack sat proudly lit by moonlight, a last bastion of the virtually unknown. She’d felt him immediately after stepping out, in the sand first, and then in the cool gust of wind off the water, which was casting the grainy shoreline back across itself. 
	It was fun to watch a million of something dance, she remembered.

	She remembered the lantern when she saw it, too, and how it clattered with kerosene as she lifted it above her head to run her fingers over the initials etched in the bottom. It burned whale oil, once, at a time when it hung from the calloused hands of her great-grandfather, or beamed proudly from the bow of his fishing boat. When her great-grandfather passed, her grandfather would use it to take Mina for ling cod, ‘the only good fish in the sea’. He’d cast his line through the pained expression on his face, and Mina would rub his shoulders when they’d begin to tremble. 

	It was an odd thing to be back in the presence of, and a bit intimidating all alone. Everyone just thought if you were old, you were brave. 
         From her boulder, the jagged-rock edges peeking from the sand looked twice as menacing in the shadow of the lantern's flame. Poor things, Mina thought. Perhaps they ached to be pillows. 
       Mina tossed her gaze like her grandfathers old line; reeling her head back and sinking her eyes into the water. It was quiet, and some might even call it silent, but Mina heard the call of a thousand names, then; in the rubbing of cricket wings, or the whooshing of water, gentle as the hawks wings above.
	Though, the hiss of the lantern stood out. It was once a rare thing, and a sound the world needed man to make. She looked at the lamp and considered its components. Man had pressed its glass from sand, and its metal from ore. Man had hunted whale, then boiled its fat and rendered it to oil. It was man who set the oil alight, driven by curiosity; the same ambition to bring hammer to steel, or spin cord to wick, or to capture the entire phenomenon within an impossible glass to safely hold the flame. 
        Mina agreed it could sound ‘man-made’, and against the gallop of horses or rumble of thunder, it was; though its hiss was clearly a medley, and she heard a lamp that once sang as its pieces: mountain, sand, and whale. 

	In a gentle way her grandfather had cursed her, since Mina never simply rode in his canoe, she would feel its hardwood ache through the whims of the water. She would breath heavy morning air, thick with change, over a plain and light breath. Even her morning coffee dripped with the roar of a lion.

     Her grandfather would chuckle at her plight.
	“You’ve the strength of an old man!” she used to remind him, frustrated with his teasing.
	“And you the fire of a young child,” he’d remind her back, his smile bright as a crescent moon on its back. 
	“The world is beautiful, everywhere!” he’d lament, his eyes alive but serious. 
	His eyes were the only two she’d ever known to hold so much of both; to be equal parts blazing and stoic, as two planets in separate skies. As Mina sat now, with her own garden of grey hairs, her heart still burned as the fire he spoke of once. His words still sent a shiver through her spine, from the back of her knees to the top of her neck. ‘Everywhere’, she’d still say to herself, pondering the direction the shiver travelled.
	‘The world is beautiful, everywhere.’
	Mina had never met her parents, and she couldn’t remember her grandmother; just him, and those words had felt especially kind when the world was a confusing ache. But growing up under the blanket of unimpeded sky, and Mina had only known the stars to be a member of the family. She’d sink into the sand with her grandfather on their beach, and gaze up to the heavens, wondering if on earth, they were a constellation to the little stars gazing back.
	‘There’s my favourite’, one star might say to another, pointing to Mina and her grandfather. ‘A big one and a little one, next to each other’.

	Her grandfather would point to his favourite constellation: Cassiopeia, named after a Greek queen. He’d promise Mina its five stars made an ‘M’ for her, and she’d crane her neck to a sky that felt tailored for her since. One summer, she heard her grandfather explain to her cousin that the five stars were in a ‘W’, for ‘William’. When she demanded her grandfather answer whose stars they were, tears welling in her eyes, he’d promised they would always be hers, and that William just needed to borrow them.

	Her grandfather passed many years ago, a ‘whisker from one hundred’, as he’d put it. Since her grandmother had passed when Mina was young, Mina had only known her through the light that spilled from her grandfather’s eyes, or the corners of his mouth when he smiled; and only more so as he’d aged. 
	On his final day, his eyes had beamed like a lighthouse, and he’d called his wife’s name. Mina knew they’d found each other again, as two lost ships in the eternity of night. That was why she’d come back to the ocean, an old woman now, and pecked her way through the sand to speak to him. She needed to tell him that she’d never seen a more curious thing in her entire life, and that she wasn't scared to go because she knew she'd see her love again.

	And she hoped it could be him. Her grandfather, if it could work like that. 

	The darkness slipped on a deeper black jacket around her, which felt like pressure on her arms. Anywhere from an hour to an eternity passed before she hobbled back to the house, and straight to the chest.
	She pulled out the puzzle, recalling it clearer, then. She was ten or eleven when her grandfather made it, and it had taken him forever; as long as one might imagine it would take to carve a thousand wood pieces by hand, each one thick and rich in detail. When he was finished, he’d simply painted them all black, front and back, and when they were dry, he’d splashed the thousand black pieces across the table.
	“It’s of the deepest reaches of the universe”, he smiled.
	It sat on his table for years, and they’d found much of the edges, but picked on it less and less as time had passed. Mina was living with her Auntie in the city then, and only spending summers at the ocean.
	They’d do the puzzle in those summer months, which soon dwindled to weeks, and then to days before becoming a day or two every other year.
	‘It’s good for young eyes’, her grandfather had said a young man when they started.
	'It’s good for old eyes’, he’d said an old man, by the end.
	“There’s no reason for a thousand black pieces”, Mina could remember pleading from all her ages.
	“There’s no reason for anything”, her grandfather would chuckle, holding a piece high above his head and squinting at it.

	One evening, before he passed; a cool one in late fall, she’d returned. She was the only person her family deemed capable of talking him into leaving. Little did they know, she’d never dream of it. She helped him to and from the water instead, and told her family he was a ‘stubborn old man’ who ‘didn’t know any better’ and that she’d ‘had it up to here with him’. She’d stretch her hands wide, showing her grandfather how far she’d had it, and he would hold his hands to his mouth to stifle his giggle. 

	One of those nights, he told her it was his dream to see the stars up close. She’d always found that rather sweet, and almost childlike; but he’d been serious, and made her promise to try, if he hadn’t made it.
	He hadn’t made it, as far as she’d known, and she hadn’t either, which had been the dying dream she pondered when she arrived; a modest one, but the reason she was perched on a boulder in the sand, whispering the eulogy and considering the sound it made.

	In his final months, he spoke of great pain; and the inevitable menace it can be, but how lucky he’d been to feel it. It had been a monster in his belly once, yet something he spoke of with levity then; bewildered at himself, perhaps, and the tales he’d lived to tell.
	“Everywhere, it’s beautiful”, he’d say, his famous words muttered backwards, but the sentiment as alive as it’d ever been on his tongue. 
	In his final weeks, he spoke of time itself. He’d pull Mina close, and speak of it as a substance, and something he could see the end of; its beautiful, red ribbon twisting to a knot.
	“Everything ends,” he had told her then.
	He said he imagined the world to be the same, as his eyes were wide as saucers and his voice in whisper. He explained that time was used, and then shredded, and turned into the fabric of the universe. 

	Mina could feel the words like braille as he spoke them. She’d felt the quilt of life. She’d laid beneath it over summers that felt they’d never end, and dreamt of a thousand years before her, and the girl who’d laid in her very spot, wishing for the very same. Her heart broke for that girl once, but the look in her grandfather’s eyes had always let her see the power of a broken heart, despite its ache.
	In his final days, he spoke of time as pain.
	‘The pain of all things’, he called it.
	He grew too difficult to understand, then, his final breath coming shortly after; snuffing him of his chance to explain ‘the pain of all things’, and what it had been.
	Though she knew she’d heard it in her infant daughter, who screamed herself awake; as did most children she thought, in their own burden of consciousness. A baby doe might rise a minute old, clamour to its awkward legs and quietly slip to the tall grass. Yet her child had wailed with the pain of a thousand lifetimes, and looked to her desperately for a light in the fog. 
	‘Welcome to earth’, was all she could whisper, her grandfather in her ear.	
	She’d felt it on her wedding day, as she peered above her husband’s head, to where she imagined her grandfather might have stood. For a moment she’d felt every lost father, everywhere and all at once. She’d seen the pain in anyone teased for hearing something in the wind, even though the wind was the only thing that seemed to speak in clear and perfect words.

	Her grandfather said the world was perfect once, which had made her upset.
	“A perfect world wouldn’t take grandma from you.”
	“Perhaps it took her to a perfect place”, he suggested, which had made Mina even more frustrated, since the perfect place was here, with them. 
	Her grandfather shook his head, chuckling. 
	“There’s only two things mad enough to challenge the design of it all”, he said, looking at her in his way. “One is the fire of a child, and the other is the ache of a man.”
	Mina looked at him back, just as serious.
	“Two dangerous things”, he continued, “that might watch the whole world turn, and wonder of a more perfect way.”
	He leaned in then, bringing his voice to a whisper.
	“And that child will always burn. That man will always ache.”
	“Do they need each other?” Mina asked.
	“Oh, yes,” he said, smiling. “Terribly so.”

	Mina opened the satin bag, and dumped the puzzle to the table. She started on the edges first, and found two immediately. She found a box of tea, too, in what was left of the kitchen, and she made one cold; a chamomile, her grandfather’s favourite. 
	She could hear him singing as she sipped it.
	‘I’d walk a thousand chamo-mile’s, for you.’
	She set the lantern on the counter, and stared out over the nine hundred and ninety-eight pieces left, pitch black on either side. She sat where she always had, and looked to where her grandfather had always been; his presence warm as the breeze had turned. 
	“There’s no reason for a thousand black pieces”, she whispered, smiling.
	“There’s no reason for anything”, she swore he whispered back.