Vital Muse Shorts

Every year, on the last day of spring, the villagers of Maruna lit paper lanterns and sent them floating across Lake Ilia. It was a ritual of remembrance—each lantern a message to those lost, a soft glow to guide memories through the veil of time.

But this year, Mira didn't want to let go.

She sat cross-legged by the shore, the lantern in her lap crumpled from the tightness of her grip. Around her, the villagers murmured prayers and goodbyes. Children laughed, their faces lit by flame and dusk. The lake shimmered like spilled ink kissed by stars.

Mira’s lantern bore the name “Kiran” in trembling script.

Her brother had been gone for a year.

They said time softened grief. But Mira knew better. Grief didn’t soften. It changed shape—sharp edges hidden in corners of memory, pain disguised as moments of stillness.

“Do you want help lighting it?” an unfamiliar voice asked.

She turned. A boy, no older than sixteen, stood beside her. He had mismatched socks and a calm in his eyes that made her chest ache.

“No,” she said. “Not yet.”

He sat down anyway.

“I didn’t want to light mine either,” he said after a moment. “My sister—she used to make jokes about the lanterns. Said they were like ‘ghost mail.’ I’d give anything to hear her laugh at them again.”

Mira didn’t answer. She didn’t know what to say to a stranger’s sorrow when hers was still shouting.

After a while, the boy stood. “If you decide to send it, I’ll be by the dock.”

He walked away, but his presence lingered, like a warm coat left behind in the cold.

The lantern in Mira’s lap felt heavier. Not with weight, but with memory.

Kiran had been older by two years. A boy with a laugh that echoed like birds at sunrise. He’d once carved her a wooden owl because she told him dreams could ride on wings. He’d called her “Little Lantern” because she was small and bright and afraid of the dark.

When he died in the storm last spring—trying to rescue a dog washed into the river—Mira stopped believing in wings. Or light.

She ran her fingers over the paper lantern’s surface. Inside it was a slip of paper with a message she hadn’t dared write until that morning: “Come back if you can. If not, please wait for me.”

Tears slipped down her cheeks. She wasn’t ready to say goodbye. But maybe that was never the point.

Maybe lighting the lantern wasn’t about letting go.

Maybe it was about letting it float.

Mira stood and carried the lantern to the dock, where the boy waited with a lit taper.

“You sure?” he asked.

“No,” she said honestly. “But I’m here.”

They knelt together. She held the lantern. He lit it.

The flame flickered uncertainly at first, as if testing its own courage. Then it caught and filled the lantern with golden breath. Mira released it with both hands.

It rose.

Not quickly. Not triumphantly. But gently.

It hovered, then drifted upward, joining the constellation of glowing hearts above the lake.

Mira watched until hers was indistinguishable from the rest.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

The boy nodded.

They stood there for a long while, two shadows in the hush of night, bound by invisible threads—grief, memory, hope.

The next morning, Mira returned to the shore. The lake was quiet again, the lanterns all gone, the sky washed clean.

But something had changed.

Not the grief. That still lived inside her.

But now it had space to breathe.

She took out a fresh sheet of paper from her sketchbook and drew a small lantern.

Underneath it, she wrote:

"When we cannot carry our grief, we let it drift until it finds a place to rest."

Then she signed it:

– Little Lantern