Lantern

She moved very carefully down the rocky path to the sea wall, carrying the lamp at her side. Moving steadily along the stone parapet, she raised the lantern and placed it on a steel hook, using both hands to pull the clamp forward and secure it. Taking a moment in near darkness, she sighed and pulled off the thing's shutters so that it shone out and out - a weak beacon pushing against the vast expanse of blue black water. "Hello," she whispered, "and goodbye." She scanned the shallow waves for him (the selkie), but found nothing. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the ribbon she had been wearing long ago when she first cried tears into the sea and called him forth. He had been a tremendous comfort, as she was just a slip of a girl and near death from grief. He had come just the one time, but she had returned again and again, besotted. "It's how they get you," the old wives said. "You fall under their spell and waste away for the pining." But she was not obsessed, simply grateful ... for the moment he proved to her that there was magic at the edges of things and life in unexpected parcels waiting to be delivered. Now, she tied the ribbon to the lantern (to claim the light symbolically), her hands stiff and gnarled with age. "I want to thank you one last time," she whispered, "for I am ill and will not come again." She closed her eyes and wished him well, but did not linger on the stones; she told herself no fairy tale that a reunion was imminent - allowed herself no flights of fancy. She moved steadily on and up and up towards home and the end of days. She did not look back one last and final time, but he did. And in the grey foam caps of the blue blackness, he lingered until the lamp went out, and cried a small ocean of his own.