PodCastle, Episode 879, February 2025
The dead of Tawlish Island watch from the shore as the last thirty-seven living inhabitants evacuate their remote, failing community. The freshwater has gone brackish, the land erodes, and the practical world has left them behind. The ghosts cannot cross salt water, so they stand helpless as their descendants wade into the sea with boats crammed full of spoons and spindles, seed packets and seabirds’ eggs — the accumulated habits of generations of scarcity. Among the departing is young Katie Zell, whose father has been dead longer than she has been alive; he rests a cold hand briefly on her curls as she is lifted onto the boat. Katie’s mother carries, tucked inside her jacket, the Tawlish Island Songbook — a collection of spell-songs that could nudge the wind, sing fish into nets, and call the drowned ashore for burial.
The story is narrated in a collective first-person plural, the voice of the Tawlish dead speaking together. They are proud, jealous, and grief-stricken all at once — they resent the abandonment but dream safe passage for the living anyway. Their only power is to send dreams across the strait, and so they do, dreaming of return, dreaming the songbook home. On the mainland, the living adapt. Katie’s mother wraps the songbook in a baptismal shawl and tucks it in a drawer. Old Maureen Stornaway, furious to have been torn from the island, clutches a knuckle of rock in her pocket and refuses to visit her dispersed children — until a grandchild is born and she boards the overnight bus without another word. Katie herself grows up caught between worlds, her accent shaped by coal-dust instead of the sea, uncertain of her claim to Tawlish.
As decades pass, the dead begin to dissolve. Without the living nearby — their laughter, their singing, the weight of their bones in the island’s thin soil — the ghosts lose their shapes, their names, and finally their songs. The rector, a mainlander at heart whom the islanders never much liked, surprises them: he had buried Lizzie Knell, a woman who chose her own end, in consecrated ground rather than the eroding sinner’s walk, privately carrying the theological burden himself. He is not a villain after all. Meanwhile Katie, guided by stories she collects as an anthropology student, discovers she has inherited her drowned father’s gift for music. She plays fiddles at ceilidhs, learns the old tunes, and eventually inherits the songbook — though the dead, fading into formlessness, never know any of this.
The story’s resolution arrives when a young man — a descendant threaded from several Tawlish bloodlines, someone who has been unconsciously listening to the dead’s dreams — rows to the island with a friend. He carries photocopied pages of the songbook, now supplemented by new songs that Katie composed for the dead: threnodies for the tiny Stornaway children, a song for her father, one for Lizzie Knell. These are not magic spells; they are something more valuable — proof that the living never forgot. He places the original songbook in a campfire, sending it across as a burnt offering.
The songs arrive. Old and new together, warped by time but recognizable, threaded through with the wind and seawater magic of Tawlish. The dead, who had believed themselves abandoned and forgotten, discover that the threads of love and memory had never gone slack across the strait. One after the other, at last, they sing.
E.M. Linden is a SFFH writer from Aotearoa New Zealand whose work has appeared on the Locus Magazine Recommended Reading List and various magazines and anthologies. Her stories are a bit literary and a bit speculative. She loves coffee, ghosts, birds, and the sea. Contact her at emlinden.bsky.social or emwrites@emlinden.blog