Rock, Shore, Thunder by Maria S. Picone

Rock, Shore, Thunder | Maria S. Picone

The nails chime as she hammers the boards of Rock Point Lighthouse. The record temperatures curve up and up, clingy fog along her back. The weather a tool wielded by a vengeful God—the year’s twenty-first named hurricane entering the Maine coast stage left. 

She ambles across her domain. In her eyes turns a kaleidoscope of patterns, brick, layered paint, iterated windows, metal. Her own turtle shell. 

The drizzle elongates. She pats the wall and goes in.

*

Slim, wiry, and freckled with brown curls, she does not fit the lighthouse keeper norm: wall-eyed, weather-battered men with few social skills. Still, her mouth has the same frown lines, carved in rough and dangerous conditions. She strips off her work gear. Darts in, out the shower, rubbing water and dead skin off her body with her towel. The frizzies in her hair tell the humidity.

Though most visitors never see the lighthouse as tourism has migrated so far from the seas, she imagines they would be surprised by the care someone has gone through to decorate it. An arrow sign that points to the “Beach” has been modified so that the arrow curves back into itself. 

It’s a mistake to check her phone; notifications flash three languages from concerned relatives and friends. Heard there was a big storm. You okay? Mother’s tongue and father’s tongue melding together with the interloping English they immigrated into. 

Her parents: They’re calling this a Cat 6 superhurricane. Slow moving. 

She starts typing but her thumbs have nothing to say. Her hair leaves droplets on the screen. Storm not yet come in.

*

With the progress of time, hurricane season swells into months upon months, waves devour the cliffs like Oreo cookies, lobsters migrate ever northward. It’s rumored that the last lighthouse keeper packed up one day and moved to the Rockies, a clear mistake given the plummet in air quality out west. 

*

Even though she knows the list like her native tongue, she counts by hand and touch. Her supplies sit like stuffed animals in easy to reach places—the couch, the countertops, even the bed. Filtered water and boring food.

Her duty is the captaining of a stationary ship: her joke to friends who couldn’t understand why she’d left the promise of it all: daily Starbucks dosing, corporate communications job, loving husband. After the divorce, there had been a cooling off, as they assessed what they knew. She grasps the silver packages that give life; she runs numbers in her head. Waiting, counting. 

Some friends who believed his mournful eyes kept the husband, and she kept the lighthouse. She would rather a vengeful God than a vengeful human who thinks he’s God.

*

They call them fish, the lighthouse keepers who survive when their charge does not. Sometimes they watch the destruction from afar via satellite imagery and hope; sometimes they wash up on shore like castoffs from a sunken ship; and other times still, they witness their curation deteriorate, called in front of a board to be informed of full divestment.

*

Like an old friend, the hurricane falls in and stays. The lighthouse cracks, rocks, rolls like a ship. Vertigo surrounds her. Thunder comes to sit in her heart, usurping its beats. Messages pour. Underneath, the implication. 

Why not come back to your old life. Why not start again from before you met him. Your father and I miss you.

Why not emerge.

The phone, on silent, is its own lightning. There’s a science behind this, like the ebb and flow of her matrimony. She waits on the edge of the bed, sweating palms braced against damp blankets.

*

In college, they’d studied the Ship of Theseus, a persistent identity quandary. A lighthouse was nothing more than a static example, linking historical past to nostalgic present. In reality, caulking, caulking, and more caulking. Discerning which available materials lay closest to authenticity, procuring them from her modest discretionary. Hosting various fundraising activities, from “Dinner Date with a Lighthouse Keeper” on socials to glitzy black-tie and lobster fetes with glitterati. Grant applications down to formatting and itemized budgets. It takes a crew to support a lighthouse. She dives in but stands alone, a beacon near, but never on, the shore. 

When inside a tempest, best to keep others at a distance. 

*

The morning hits like a fresh band of storm, a countershock of silence and light. A tentative sun has risen. She wakes mashing the phone screen, finding service enough to see that this was the eye, not the end. Walking, caulking what she can. Surveying slices of flesh the wind already sheared, putting visuals to sounds that orchestrated her sleep. The final message from her parents reads, This is serious. She types them a note, hopes it escapes the stifling sunlight.

* 

It is alive, howling, every blow, every abusive word, each power play blasted in full lunatic moon, abraded with wind, derided by rain and it keeps her up, up where she cannot will it down and she holds the phone like a beacon and the generator goes and it is hot with fear and the smell of brackish water and the lighthouse loses its oneness its shelter its shell safety and comes down the way a tree crushes a car and dents, splits her resting place, holding integrity, batters her like a drunken night and her skin song dances bruises, sweats a second rain, water a gulp in the dark and the storm, the lighthouse over, a marriage can be in pieces a lighthouse too and it is time when the sun comes up Maine pink into boiled red on the final fermata of the storm and backpack in hand she jumps ship—

*

Thrash, swim. 

Waves calming, to shore, some resilient Mainer checking the coast to find her, the glow she’s moving toward those damn notifications, chimes of lives pinging her, to come home.

Inland, inland.

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