The Ghost Ship

Medium: Ink and graphite on Arches paper, mounted to birch panel, varnished

Dimensions: 9" x 12"

Long Island, New York

The Story:
It always would toll, the bell on the ship, and many heard it. Some claimed to see it too, but none had proof. There was no definitive pattern to its ringing. The only correlation that some claimed was that it could only be heard when the fog was at its thickest. No sense of time, just when the fog was impossibly thick.
She loved the lighthouse, its odd placement in the middle of a river just outside of the small town in which she grew up. She liked the ghost ship stories too, and at a younger and more gullible age, she thought maybe there was some truth to them. But at the age of twenty-four, she no longer paid the stories any mind. She was a creature of habit though, and the part of her long ago sixteen-year-old self that started every morning by having her coffee at dawn on the bench in front of the lighthouse was unwavering. As time went on, she had discovered her deep love of birding, identifying them and documenting them in her sketchbook. Justifying her morning trips to the lighthouse by drawing birds felt more adult than her previous motivation to be the first one to ever document the ghost ship. Years went by, pencils were worn out, and sketchbooks were filled with drawings of birds. And yes, she had heard the tolling of the bell, but she knew it for what it was: some old marina just out of sight, housing sailboats whose fog bells sounded across the water.
It wasn't until the third time that she realized the pattern. It seemed to her that every time there was fog (and she knew because she took down the weather conditions in her notes, seeking patterns in the birds), she saw only one bird very clearly – a cormorant. Yet there was something off about these sketches; it was not only the same type of bird, but the exact same bird. And not only that, it was also in the exact same position. And there was something else, too – each of the three times that she drew him, he was far larger than he should have been. She didn't like to say it aloud for fear of sounding arrogant, but she knew that she was pretty good, so this was an odd mistake to repeat. She chalked it up to the fog having a distorting effect, but it still bothered her. In all three sketches, the bird perched atop the lighthouse, wings spread, seen only through the thick fog by a cutting clarity from the light that poured out of the fresnel lens.
The next time it happened, she did not let herself get lost in the act of sketching. She watched the bird as it stood statue-like atop the light, wings spread, looking into the fog, into the nothingness. Or so she thought. Because just then, when she would usually have her head down sketching, she saw it. She saw it before she heard it. And then she heard it. She heard the bell. Her eyes darted back to the cormorant, who was now doing a strange unsettling dance to the beat of the bell. He summoned it, she thought, without fully processing what this thought meant. She turned and ran back home.
But on the next irresistible foggy day, she went again. And again, she saw the strangely oversized bird dancing its small, odd dance to its ship. This time, she drew the scene before her. When people saw the drawing in her sketchbook, they thought she was being funny or imaginative. She just laughed and agreed, because she didn't want to know. Maybe all those ghost ship stories she was told as a child had tricked her into believing that she had seen the impossible. Or maybe it was real. But the real reason she never told anyone was because she cherished her sweet mornings spent in the solitude of the lighthouse. She knew that when people heard of the ghost ship they too would come when the fog was thick, trying to see the bird dancing to its ship. She wanted her mornings spent in the fog to be just that; her mornings alone.