The Tides That Bind

In the coastal town of Selithyre, the sea did not speak—it sang. Its waves hummed lullabies in minor keys, and its tides left sheet music etched in seaweed on the shore. The townsfolk collected these compositions in jars, hung them from porch rafters, and pretended not to hear the dirges hidden in the harmonies.

Nessa returned after a decade, her mother’s ashes sealed in a violin case. Inside lay a bow strung with silver hair brittle as spider silk. Her childhood home, a crumbling cottage above the bluffs, had walls papered with water-stained sonatas. She’d come to burn it all. Instead, she found her mother’s gramophone, its brass horn twisted into the shape of a woman’s scream.

When she cranked the handle, the sea stilled. The gramophone spilled a sound like wind through shipwrecks, and Nessa was sixteen again, salt crusting her lips as her mother’s voice cut through the static: “You’ll never be more than a missed note.”

The needle snapped. The present rushed back, the waves now clawing at the cottage’s foundation.

That night, a woman waded ashore in Nessa’s dreams, kelp tangled in her hair and oysters cracking open in her palms. “You shouldn’t play what you’re not ready to hear.”

Nessa restrung the bow with her own auburn hair and played anyway. The sonatas summoned ghosts: her mother’s cigarette smoke curling into eighth rests, the violin she’d carved into kindling after failing her audition, the sea swallowing her father’s laughter. The cottage dissolved—floorboards warped into cello strings, windows shattered into glissando shrieks.

The woman pressed an oyster to Nessa’s ear. Inside, her father’s voice hummed a lullaby. “You don’t have to forgive her,” the woman said, “but you can’t drown in her wake forever.”

Nessa woke on the beach, the cottage gone. The sea had left a new composition in its place—a single line of sheet music, its notes shaped like apologies.

She left it unplayed.