This is a ship.
It wakes to rain that never falls. Drops hang in the air like glass beads, suspended between sky and sea. The crew walks through them carefully, each droplet humming with a different note. Together, they form a song no one admits to knowing.
The boy cups one of the drops in his hand. It doesn’t burst. Instead, it flickers with a memory he hasn’t had yet: a lantern breaking, a name spoken twice, a door opening where no wall exists. He closes his fist. The drop is gone. The memory lingers.
By noon, the rain has thickened into threads. Silver lines run from the clouds into the sea, sewing sky and water together. The woman ties her hair with one of the threads and whispers, “It remembers.” No one asks what she means. The cat just arches its back and bats at a strand until it frays into sparks.
The captain paces the deck. His boots leave prints that smoke. When he looks back, the prints are gone, replaced with someone else’s—a child’s, or maybe his own from years ago. He doesn’t follow them. He knows better.
At dusk, the rain-threads unravel all at once, collapsing into a single woven sheet that spreads across the sea. It shines like a mirror too polished to hold reflections. The ship sails over it anyway. For a moment, it feels like moving across the surface of an unspoken promise.
Then the sheet ripples. Faces press against it from beneath—some familiar, some not. The crew holds their breath. The boy whispers, “They’re waiting.” The woman answers, “No. They’re remembering.”
The cat leaps onto the railing and stares straight down. Its shadow does not follow. Instead, the shadow-cat walks calmly across the shining sea, tails splitting into three, eyes closed as though in prayer. The real cat flicks its ear and turns away.
By midnight, the sea ignites. Not with fire, but with light—thousands of faint glows rising from the depths, drifting upward like lanterns freed from hands. Each one carries a word. Some the crew recognize, some they can’t read, some they hope never to hear again. The captain catches one. It says simply: Again.
The woman lights a rope and ties it around the mast. She hums the song from the morning droplets. One by one, the crew joins in. Even the boy whistles it backwards, and the cat hums low in its throat. The light from the sea answers, pulsing in rhythm, until the horizon itself seems to breathe.
When dawn breaks, the rain is gone, the threads forgotten, the sheet vanished. Only the humming in their bones remains.
And it still sails.
