What the Tide Brought In

It wasn’t driftwood or jellyfish,
not rope or cracked plastic,
not the usual ghosts of summer—

but a door.
Painted green once,
now weather-flaked and sea-soft,
hinges rusted shut,
and no frame to speak of.

It lay on the sand
like a promise undelivered,
half-buried by seaweed
and yesterday’s tide.

A child touched it first,
then ran, shouting nonsense—
or prophecy,
depending on how you hear children.

Someone said it came from a shipwreck,
another swore it was from a drowned house
out west, where the coast gave way last winter.
A man with binoculars said
he’d seen it float in from the east—
from the horizon,
where things should stay.

We watched,
the way people do
when waiting for something sacred
to stop being awkward.

No one moved it.
No one opened it.
We simply walked around it for days,
some of us dreaming saltwater dreams,
some waking with sand in our beds.

By the time the council came with gloves and a van,
the beach had gone oddly quiet.
The sea, for once, had pulled back its commentary.
And the door, they said, was gone.

First published in Black Nore Review in September 2025