She Sailed Through The Caves

And then she sailed—yes, sailed, not in any boat you or I might recognize (though we might, in the heart’s midnight, wish otherwise), but in a vessel of bone and dusted stars, through the caves where language was first hidden and perhaps first betrayed.
Not the tourist caves. Not the ones with guided lights and brochures promising stalactites like fangs and minerals like gods. No. These were other caves.
She sailed them with her eyes closed.
The darkness pressed, not like velvet, but like something more granular. Like the hush of a lover you’ve not yet met, whispering your name in a dialect that aches.
In those caves, were echoes of the tantalizing dreams of nearby strangers—half-wanted, half-stolen. It wasn’t the content of those dreams that mattered (the man with the broken harmonica; the girl whose limbs were made of ash), but their residue, their abandoned textures. The sweat on their necks. The trembling of almost touching.
She sailed by them, each dream a wet candle.
Above her, stalactites breathed. Below her, the shadows stirred. Occasionally, a sound would bloom. The tales from the other side of closed doors—they floated in the water like old photographs, half developed, half erased.
“Mother?” one of them asked, voice muffled by time and apology.
Another: “He didn’t mean to.”
And then: “We were just children.”
How heavy are stories when they have no one left to remember them?
She did not speak. She had left her tongue at the threshold, as was custom. A tongue is too noisy, too proud. Instead, she listened. The haunting cries half heard before waking—the ones that slither back into the skull just before you open your eyes and decide they were nothing—these cries curled around her ankles, licked her ribs. They did not want rescue. They wanted witness. And so she gave them that.
She passed the smile in the shadows, too. You know the one. You’ve seen it. Maybe in a mirror once, when your reflection delayed just slightly. Or in a hallway, just before sleep, when you thought the coat rack twitched. The smile where there is no mouth. The eyes that do not exist, and yet ache as if they’ve been weeping for centuries. That smile lingered in the air like a bad promise.
She didn’t flinch.
Because she, too, was becoming.
Not woman, not ghost, not myth. But something else. Something between the breath and the name. She remembered her father once told her, “Beware of the silence that hums. It means something wants to be born.”
She was humming now.
The vessel rocked. The caves began to tighten around her. Bones remembered being crushed. Air remembered being lost. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the only thing she had carried: a key made of sleep. Useless in most doors, but not these.
She turned it in the air. There was no lock, but the key twisted just the same.
And then: light.
No, not light—awareness.
The boat dissolved. The caves sang. The strangers dreamt of her now.
Somewhere above, in the shallower world, a woman woke with tears in her eyes and did not know why.
But beneath—below—within—she sailed on.
Still listening.
Still humming.
Becoming.