What The Ocean Took

The ocean had always been a part of Clara’s life. She was born in a cottage on the windswept cliffs of the Maine coast, raised by a fisherman father who smelled of salt and seaweed and a mother who hummed old sea shanties as lullabies. Every morning, the tide whispered stories through the stones and sea-glass outside their home. Clara used to listen, believing the waves carried messages from another world.

But on the morning of October 12th, when she was seventeen, the ocean stopped telling stories.

That was the day her brother, Eli, didn’t come back.

It had started like any other autumn morning. A pale mist hovered above the waves, and the sea was restless, but not angry. Clara had brought Eli a thermos of hot tea as he packed the lobster traps into their father’s old skiff. His smile was lopsided, still half-asleep. He ruffled her hair, promised to be back by noon, and pushed off into the gray.

He never returned.

The Coast Guard searched for three days. They found the skiff capsized near Blackwater Cove, one trap caught in a reef, its wire bent like it had struggled against something far stronger than a crustacean. But there was no sign of Eli.

No body. No clue. Just the silence that followed.

Their mother stopped singing. Their father sold the boat.

Clara stopped going near the water.

Years passed, but the grief did not dull—it calcified, like barnacles clinging to her ribs. Clara moved inland to Boston for college, studied marine biology to try to make sense of the very thing that had taken her brother. She spent years trying to understand the language of tides, the patterns of currents, even the behavior of storms. None of it answered the question that kept her awake at night: What did the ocean take him for?


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Ten years later, Clara returned to the coast.

Their mother had died the previous winter, and the cottage sat vacant, the sea breeze peeling paint from the shutters. Her father had long since moved south, leaving the place in Clara’s name. She hadn’t planned to stay more than a few days—just long enough to settle the estate and say goodbye properly.

But the ocean called to her again.

It was subtle at first. The crash of waves no longer made her flinch. The salt air began to feel like home. One evening, as she stood barefoot on the rocks where Eli used to fish, she saw something glinting between the stones.

A silver pendant.

She recognized it instantly—Eli’s Saint Christopher medallion, the one their mother had given him when he first learned to swim. The chain was tangled with seaweed, and the metal was tarnished by years underwater.

Clara stared at it in disbelief. The tide had gone out, revealing the medallion just feet from where she stood. How could it have surfaced now, after a decade? How had it not washed away?

That night, she dreamed of Eli. He stood on the shore, soaked and pale, speaking in a language she didn’t recognize—his mouth moved like the tide, rhythmic, deep. When she reached for him, a wave pulled her under.

She woke gasping.

Something had changed.


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The days grew stranger. Clara began hearing whispers in the wind—faint, unintelligible sounds that disappeared the moment she turned her head. At night, the waves seemed to echo her name. The beach behind the cottage yielded more objects: a boot she remembered Eli wearing, a bit of red cloth from his old flannel shirt.

She wasn’t losing her mind—at least, not in the way others feared. She was being summoned.

The morning she decided to answer, the sky was cloudless, the sea unusually still. She put the medallion around her neck and walked into the surf.

She expected cold, but the water was warm—welcoming. It rose past her knees, her waist, her chest. When it covered her head, she opened her eyes.

The world beneath was not the dark, silt-churned abyss she feared. It was luminous. Schools of silver fish darted through glowing kelp forests. Bioluminescent tendrils lit a path downward, and she followed, breathing as if she were still on land.

At the bottom, she saw him.

Eli.

He hadn’t aged. His eyes were the same sea-glass green. He stood barefoot on a ridge of coral, arms open, as though waiting all this time.

“This is what the ocean took,” a voice echoed—not Eli’s, but the ocean’s itself.

Clara understood then. The sea hadn’t stolen him. It had chosen him. Just as it now chose her.

The world above the waves faded.

The next day, the townspeople found Clara’s footprints leading into the surf.

No one ever saw her again.

But if you stand on the cliffs on certain misty mornings, some swear they hear two voices singing—a brother and sister, their harmony carried on the tide.