LEEBUMSOO

Romance

The Paper Lighthouse

The Paper Lighthouse a short story The lighthouse had been dark for thirty years, but every evening Mira climbed its one hundred and twelve steps anyway, carrying a thermos of barley tea and her grandfather's old logbook. The logbook was nearly full. Not with weather reports or shipping records — those pages had ended long ago, in her grandfather's careful hand. The newer pages were full of paper boats. Small ones, folded flat and pressed between the sheets like flowers. One for every evening she had climbed the stairs since he died. "You're wasting your time," said the man from the county office, the one who came each spring with a clipboard. "The light's decommissioned. Ships use satellites now. Nobody needs a lighthouse keeper." "I'm not a keeper," Mira said. "I'm a granddaughter." He wrote something on his clipboard and left, the way he always did. That night the storm came in sideways, the kind of storm that made the windows hum. Mira sat in the lamp room with her tea and watched the sea turn the color of old iron. Below, in the harbor, the fishing boats huddled together like sheep. All except one. It was small — a dinghy, really — and it was too far out, tilting badly, its single light blinking in a panicked rhythm. Mira grabbed the radio her grandfather had left, the one she kept charged out of habit rather than hope. "This is Gull Point," she said. "Small craft east of the breakwater, do you copy?" Static. Then a boy's voice, thin as thread: "I can't see the harbor. I can't see anything." Mira looked at the great dead lamp beside her. The county had removed the bulb years ago. The wiring was stripped. There was nothing left to light. But there were one hundred and twelve steps, and on

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