001 — gardener

At low tide, the library returned every book it had ever swallowed, stacked neatly on the wet sand with the fines tucked inside. Mina came for an atlas and found instead a slim volume titled The Things You Will Say Tomorrow. Its first hundred pages were blank. On the last page, in handwriting that looked alarmingly like her own, someone had written: “Please don’t let the lighthouse finish its sentence.” Beyond the breakwater, the lamp blinked once, and every gull turned to listen.