Last Lighthouse
The lighthouse smelled like kelp and crab shells—like memory baked into stone. There hadn’t been crabs in years. No kelp forests swaying below the rocks. Just water—wide and glinting, slightly viscous, as if the ocean had started rewriting itself.
Still, the solar mirrors turned with the sun. The algae batteries pulsed quietly in their tanks. The lighthouse stood—patched with scrap, rust, and stubbornness—humming faintly with stored light, like it, too, was waiting for someone to return.
The mirrors creaked in the wind, complaining about corrosion. Valid complaints. But there was no one left to hear them except Cora.
She adjusted the southeast panel with the heel of her sneaker, now permanently waterlogged and sprouting something green. Barnacles clung to the frame like they were afraid to fall. She kicked them off anyway.
A seagull landed on the railing—pulsing red lights for eyes, feet made from salvaged school bus parts. It screamed, “Try Zap-Cola! Refresh Your System!” The voice glitched at the end like a laugh that forgot how to stop.
Cora waved it off. It stared back, unblinking.
It had been three years since Gran disappeared during the solar flare. The Council filed her as presumed lost—another missing part in the great machine of collapse. Irretrievable. Not worth the trouble. Like a sock in the dryer of the end times.
But Cora knew better.
Everyone said the lighthouse was obsolete. Sea lanes were automated. Drones tracked currents better than any human could. No one needed a seventeen-year-old in algae-charged boots and emotional duct tape manning a rusting tower on a cliff that kept trying to fall apart.
Still, she lit the beacon every night.
Not for ships.
Just in case Gran remembered the way home.
And then, one dawn, the signal came.
A flash across the mirrors.
Not from the cities. Not from the coast.
From the open water.
By midday, something impossible breached the horizon.
At first, Cora thought it was a mirage—green where there had only ever been blue. But it grew closer, clearer. A garden-vessel, adrift and alive. Its sails unfurled like moth wings, iridescent and trembling, drinking in the light. Ivy climbed the rigging. Strawberries spilled from broken teacups nailed to the hull. Ferns unfurled between solar panels. Mushrooms glowed in shaded crevices. A breeze—where there should have been none—carried the scent of basil and rain.
Pollinators—tiny machines with wings like stained glass—fluttered from flower to flower, murmuring in static. Beneath them, algae lines glowed green-gold through the hull like veins beneath skin.
A boy leaned over the edge. His hair was full of petals.
He waved, like he’d been looking for her.
“Was that your signal?” he called. “A recipe for caramel candies.”
Cora shrugged. “Just watching the place for my Gran.”
He docked his floating forest and stepped onto the platform, barefoot, hands stained green.
“I’m Cass,” he said. “Solar nomad. Part-time pollen thief. I’ve been looking for bees.”
She blinked. “You’re about a decade late.”
“I heard a rumor,” he said. “About a lighthouse that remembered things. One that didn’t forget like the rest of the world did.”
She glanced back at the tower. “This place?”
“Yeah. This place.”
“It’s just a beacon. I light it. It glows. That’s it.”
He smiled. “I think it’s more. Climate data. Seed banks. Pollinator records. Stuff people decided was easier to forget.”
“You think she hid all that here?” Cora folded her arms. “And you came for bees?”
“I came for anything,” he said, “that still remembers how to bloom.”
They found it near dusk, after the beacon cast long shadows across the sea. Cass had been fiddling with a rusted valve near the base when he knocked loose a panel.
“Hey,” he called. “There’s something under here.”
Cora knelt beside him. The panel bore a faded engraving—a honeybee, wings spread. She pried it open. Inside: a hollow pocket wrapped in oilcloth. A cedar box, no bigger than a toolbox.
Inside: rows of glass tubes, each holding a single seed—carefully labeled in Gran’s looping script. Goldenrod. Amaranth. Indigo. Milkweed.
Folded between the vials were brittle hand-drawn maps. Coastlines reshaped by time. Xs in red. Paths weaving through rewilded zones. A thin booklet in the lid: Pollinators: Adaptive Strategies & Nesting Habits.
Cass stared. “She saved them. Seeds?”
“No,” he whispered. “Beginnings.”
She closed the box gently, like it could still feel something.
Outside, the beacon hummed.
Cass left at sunset. The sea reflected the sky like melted glass. His garden boat drifted from the cove, sails golden, vines trailing like streamers unraveling into dusk. It moved the way dreams do when you wake too soon: soft, unfinished.
He waved once. Didn’t look back.
“You could come with me,” he’d said.
“I could,” she’d said.
But she wouldn’t.
He had the maps, the seeds, the kind of wild-eyed hope that floats.
She had the cliffs, the salt-worn stone, and a promise stitched into the bones of the lighthouse.
The wind was soft that night, like the world had finally exhaled. The seagull settled on her shoulder, his tin-feathered head ticking faintly, eyes dimmed to a soft red glow. He didn’t speak. Maybe he understood. Or maybe his battery was low.
Cora didn’t mind the silence.
She lit the beacon.
Not for Cass, already a blur on the horizon.
Not even for Gran, though some part of her still listened for the voice that never came back.
She lit it for whatever came next.
The beam turned, mirrors catching the light. It swept over the dark sea like a hand brushing back a curtain.
And for one moment—brief and delicate—something answered. A shimmer. A flicker on the edge of knowing.
Then nothing.
Still, she stayed at the railing, watching.
Her breath curled into the air, fading.
Her hope didn’t.
She had stayed.
That mattered.
It had to.
Kelsey Stewart is a writer from Houston. She holds a bachelor's degree from Loyola Marymount University and is currently pursuing a master's degree in creative writing at Harvard.
