Beneath Ceaseless Skies, March 2026
On the second anniversary of a storm that claimed her son Gunter, his wife Liesel, and their two young boys Rolf and Willi, elderly Gerda makes her way to the shoreline at dusk with a quiet, settled purpose: to throw herself into the sea and join her family in its depths. She has spent two years hollowing out in the house that once belonged to her son, enduring the well-meaning visits of neighbors like Ilse while letting her grief calcify into something bitter and resigned. Tonight, she intends to force the sea to finish what it started.
Instead, she finds a child washed up on the sand — a girl of eight or nine, with dark wet hair and startling sea-green eyes. Every maternal instinct Gerda believed long dead surges back to life. The girl is not local; no one in the village is missing a child. She doesn’t speak, doesn’t offer her name, and grows evasive whenever Gerda asks about her origins. Gerda takes her in, dresses her in her grandsons’ old clothes, and names her Cäcilie — Cili for short — after her own mother. Ilse half-jokes that she might be a “sea child,” a creature of folklore. Gerda dismisses the idea.
The weeks that follow are suffused with a painful, tender domesticity. Gerda sews Cili a dress trimmed with blue — a color the girl silently indicates she loves, just as Willi once did — cutting up her dead grandson’s shirts to make it, grieving and going on. Cili proves to be an exceptional swimmer, at ease in the water in a way that seems less like comfort than belonging. She watches the sea from the window with a longing that Gerda recognizes and fears. When Gerda brings her to the beach one afternoon and watches her dive cleanly beneath the surface again and again, the suspicion that the sea sent this child to her — whether as consolation or taunt — deepens into something she cannot dismiss.
The suspicion becomes conviction when Cili, playing on the beach with her dolls, casually uses the names Willi and Rolf — names Gerda is certain she never mentioned. When pressed, Cili says only that she met two boys she liked, in the water. The implication is quiet and devastating. Gerda spirals between the desire to hold Cili close forever and the fear that she is harboring something inhuman, something predatory, something that cannot and will not stay. She stops letting Cili go to the sea, and the girl slowly wilts — growing quieter, stiller, her spirit visibly dimming.
At last Cili asks, plainly and without guile, to be allowed to go back. Gerda sees in her frightened, pleading face not a monster but a child far from home, and understands that she cannot keep her. They walk down to the shore together. Gerda watches as Cili wades in, dives, and disappears beneath the surface. Standing alone at the retreating tide, Gerda whispers her oldest prayer — I’ve given her back to you; give mine back to me — and receives no answer. She turns away at last, too tired for tears, and thinks she might stop by Ilse’s for tea.
Justin Wesley Ferguson has been writing for as long as he can remember (relying on stick figures before he could spell), with some of his earliest work including Legend of Zelda fanfiction. He finished his first novel when he was twelve. Justin lives in Kansas with his husky, Phoenix, who makes sure he takes regular breaks from writing to go on walks. This is his first professional sale.