The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter
Fiction
Grizzly-haired Tomas Pader had lived alone in the lighthouse, barely a soul to keep company, and he never treads on the mainland if he could avoid it. His only companions had been the rush and tumble of the ocean waves, the scant tang of a sea breeze, and the ships passing by day or by nightfall under the watch of his keen eyes.
It was a wonder I had ever been born at all, but my mother fell in love with the lighthouse long before she had ever met the man who presided over its care and upkeep. She had been a summer bird, there for a few weeks and then gone back to the north when the waters turned cool. I had a picture of her from those summers: her pretty blonde hair in ringlets, a red mouth puckered into a kiss, and an old-fashioned bathing suit that hinted at the curves beneath. She probably could have given a mermaid a lesson or two; that’s likely how my father fell into the net she had cast for him.
But, just like summer’s whims, it wasn’t meant to last. My father wouldn’t leave behind his duty to the lighthouse, and my mother left that summer with a secret growing in her belly. It would be many long years before my mother wrote a letter and told my father of my existence. But he never wrote back.
The first summer I saw the lighthouse from afar, I was fifteen and lean like a whip. My mother had…
