Echoes of Past

The storm had passed, but the sky still wore its bruises. From the large window in her studio, Clara Thompson watched the sea churn under the morning fog. The waves, relentless and white-capped, smashed against the jagged rocks below like they were trying to climb back into the sky. Her studio overlooked Eliot Point — the same cliffside where the lighthouse stood like a sentinel, dim and forgotten. She lifted her mug, the tea inside cold and untouched, and stared down at the canvas resting on her easel. It was meant to be a painting of the lighthouse. It had started as that. But something inside her had refused to finish it. What stood on the canvas now was a blurred skeleton of the place — its form eroded by layers of grays and storm-stained blues. It was no longer a lighthouse. It was a ghost. Like everything else. Clara ran a thumb across her palette, absently mixing blue into a slate tone that looked like bruised water. The smell of turpentine clung to the air — sharp, familiar. Comforting, in the way pain sometimes was when you’d lived with it too long. Behind her, shelves were stacked with incomplete work. Fractured portraits. Landscapes that faded at the horizon. Her entire studio was a graveyard of unfinished thoughts. Some had started strong but died halfway through, victims of memory. She had lived in this seaside town for five years now. She had arrived unannounced, carrying only three boxes: clothes, brushes, and a plastic folder with what remained of Ethan. It had been twenty years since he died. But in Clara’s mind, he still lived between the seconds — in the sudden silence of birds, in a smell that came from nowhere, in dreams that left her waking with a sob lodged in her throat. Ethan was her brother. Her shadow. Her best friend. He had died when she was twelve and he was eight. They had said it was an accident. A fall. That’s all anyone ever said. But she remembered the scream. The hush. The silence afterward. And her mother — rigid, glass-eyed, too still. Clara often wondered if she would’ve survived that year without her art teacher, Mrs. Bell. The woman had let Clara stay behind after class to paint for hours. Gave her canvases to take home. Encouraged her to apply to art school when no one else thought she was worth the tuition. And yet, despite a scholarship and a career in restoration, she had fled it all to...return to the quiet, sea-lashed edge of nowhere. Here, no one knew her as “the girl whose brother died.” No one flinched at her last name. Here, she could be a ghost in her own right. The studio had once been part of a seaside inn, built in the early 1900s. The floorboards creaked with every step like they resented being walked on, and the plaster walls peeled in the corners. But it was hers. It faced the sea and the crumbling lighthouse beyond Eliot Point — the very one she had tried, and failed, to paint a hundred times. She turned away from the canvas and moved toward the shelf near her window. Resting in the corner was a faded blue box. She hesitated before pulling it down. Inside were only a few things: a cracked action figure, Ethan’s last school report, and a folded drawing of the two of them holding hands beneath a smiling sun. The drawing had survived decades. Her heart never had. A knock at the door made her flinch. “Clara?” called a voice — soft, slightly hoarse with age. It was Irene, her landlady. Clara composed herself. “Yeah?” Irene peeked in, holding a small envelope. “Mail. Just this one. No return address. Strange old thing. Thought it might be important.” Clara wiped her fingers on her apron and took the envelope. The paper was aged, yellowing at the edges, with her name written in elegant cursive. “Thanks,” she said absently. Irene lingered for a moment, her eyes skimming the canvas. “That’s the lighthouse, isn’t it?” she asked. Clara nodded. “I’ve lived here fifty years,” Irene murmured. “And that place still gives me the chills. Like it remembers something awful.” Clara didn’t reply. She waited for the door to close before sitting at her worktable and running her fingers over the envelope. The paper smelled faintly of lavender and old wood — like a house sealed off for years. She opened it carefully. Inside was a single sheet of paper. > Clara, What you remember is not the truth. Ethan’s death was never meant to happen the way they told you. You need to come home. —A. She read it three times. Her fingers trembled by the fourth. What you remember is not the truth. The words were a weight pressed against her ribs. She stood abruptly, the stool scraping against the floorboards. Who was "A"? Why now? She hadn’t set foot in her childhood home since her father’s funeral eight years ago. The house had been emptied, the air stale and thick with unsaid things. Her mother hadn’t called. Hadn’t written. Clara hadn’t asked why. She stared at the letter. It felt like a voice calling from underwater — distant, urgent, impossible. She moved to the window, her fingers tightening on the frame. Outside, the fog was pulling back slowly, revealing the outline of Eliot Point, sharp and jagged against the gray sky. The lighthouse loomed there, barely visible. It looked... wrong. Like a scar on the edge of the world. Her mind flickered. The scream. The sound of waves. The silence after. She pressed her palm to the glass. Ethan had loved that lighthouse. He used to beg to climb it, convinced it was filled with secrets. She used to laugh and call him a pirate, and he’d run down the shore, yelling that he’d find treasure and leave her behind. But he never did. And now someone wanted her to return — to the house, to the past, to the grave she’d buried all those years ago beneath layers of silence. Her throat tightened. She turned back to the letter and read it again. There were no postmarks. No date. Only her name. Only the past, clawing its way back through the cracks. She walked to her bookshelf and pulled out Ethan’s folder. Flipping it open, she stared at the drawing again. The smiling sun, the lighthouse in the corner. Two stick figures with matching brown hair and uneven smiles. He’d signed his name in big block letters: E-T-H-A-N. Below it, in her neater, looping cursive: Clara. She hadn’t looked at it in years. Now she couldn’t stop. The wind rattled the window. The sea roared below like it was remembering something, too. Clara sat back down at her easel. She picked up her brush. The canvas stared back, empty and accusing. She dipped the brush into a fresh pool of gray and, for the first time in months, began to paint again. But she wasn’t painting the lighthouse anymore. She was painting the moment before the scream.