The Driftwood Letters
A young girl named Chako discovers cryptic messages washed ashore on driftwood soon after her mother’s disappearance. Drawn into the open sea, she braves storms, a lurking monster, and the relentless pull of grief, following the tides to reunite her family and uncover the truths hidden beneath the waves.
By A.A. Reyes
✷
Every low tide, when the sea fell back and the rocks glistened bare again, I went out to find my mother. She was never where she had been before, always drawn someplace new in the fog and stone, and I had to hurry along the shore before the tide could pull her back in.
I first started with her body; a mound of sand smoothed into the curve of her shoulders. Then her hair, long strands of sea lettuce, dark and glossy when wet, like how hers used to cling to her cheeks before it fell out in clumps. For her eyes, I pried two barnacles from the stone, a more reliable choice than the crabs that liked to skitter away and leave her blind. A mussel shell became her nose, a gumboot chiton her mouth, and two small snails pressed into the sides of her head for ears. When finished, I sat beside her, knees drawn to my chest, and together we watched the waves.
I told her how the town had fallen quiet again. Storefronts shuttered for winter; the snowbirds having drifted south to their pastel shorefront nests. I skirted around the word lonely, not wanting to worry her, but in truth, that’s exactly what I was. Most townsfolk had gone to sea chasing the rumor of a great beast off the bay, a creature they called Grayback, for the glimpses of feathered flesh trailing from its back like kelp. Father was among them, spending weeks away, returning each time with a little less brown in his eyes, covered by a gray like the fog. As if the sea had been stripping pieces of him away.
I’d considered telling him he didn’t need to go so far, that everything he’d lost was still here, waiting for him on shore. But it had proven impossible to speak to a man who refused to even look at me. The last time he did, his eyes had focused only on the silver star around my neck—the same one my mother had always worn. Then, after a long silence, he finally said, “She made her choice, girl. No point in following her into the deep.” By morning he was already gone, back at sea before the sun had risen, and I wondered if he even believed his own warning, or if he’d accepted he might be swept away all the same.
That fear of him vanishing, of there being no one left to remember her the way I needed her remembered, drew me closer to my sand creation—Mother as I recalled her, or tried to. Yet she still felt incomplete. The bare sand on her chest an unwanted reminder of the small holes already boring into my memories of her.
So I slipped back into the pools, combing the rocks for something worthy to set above her heart. But when my fingers closed around a piece of bright orange coral fused to driftwood, I paused, confused by the color because coral rarely survives being torn from the reef, bleaching to a brittle, sickly white. The same empty color that followed Mother home after every long visit to the doctors.
But as the tide brought more coral and driftwood to shore, each piece a brilliant pink, yellow, and blue, I gathered them one by one, laying them face-up on the wet sand beside her. Then, without thinking, I asked if she saw it too, the letters etched into the coral forming words.
At first, I thought it was a prank, one of the younger kids gluing bits of scarred coral to scraps of the old dock. But there was no movement behind the pier, and no footprints in the sand but my own. Which meant that someone, somewhere far at sea, was trying desperately to send a message to shore.
I thought of Mother, swallowed by those same waters. But Father’s rigid certainty quickly cast an ugly doubt, insisting that she had left by choice, too afraid to face the pain waiting on land. He’d warned me that hoping for anything else would only make the truth hit harder when spring came and she still hadn’t returned.
Yet still I knelt in the sand, fitting the coral pieces together as though finishing the last pieces of a puzzle I’d long been told to throw away. And when a sentence emerged, I could only stare. Because there, spelled out in the sand, were my mother’s last words, spoken the night before she disappeared: When you feel alone, Chako, find the sea. Then shout your heart to it, and the currents will carry you to me.
I dropped to my knees as the tide surged in, trying to trap the words in my mind before the water could wash them away. Because if the message was real, then Mother was still alive, and I could almost see her standing on the beach again, whispering the names of the drowned just as she always had. An old ritual passed down from her mother, born of the belief that lost voices littered the sea—confused, desperate things searching for someone to guide them home.
I’d always assumed it was another of her stories meant to keep me from wandering too far. But now, it was the only explanation that made sense.
She must have tried to guide them again on the night she disappeared. And in her kindness, the voices had mistaken her for one of their own, pulling her down into whatever fathomless place they gathered, far beyond the reach of the bay.
So I shouted back, letting her know I had found her message at last, and that however deep the sea had buried her, I would follow her voice into the black and bring her home.
✷
Three weeks later, Father returned, his arrival marked by the running lights of his boat cutting through the fog like an anglerfish’s glow. I waited on the dock, clutching water-logged sheets of paper, each scrawled with strange descriptions of where Mother had found herself: a floating island miles offshore, encircled by coral reefs and impossibly thick cedar and pine. A menagerie of otters, seals, and other creatures watched her, curious but harmless. On the first page, her latest message pleaded for us to come find her before the winter storms, followed by a string of numbers I was certain were her coordinates.
But as the boat drew near and the crew disembarked, their defeated faces confirmed another failed catch. Whispers of Grayback spread among them—how the beast’s bottomless stomach had emptied the ocean, and how, if this continued, food would have to be brought in from inland using the last of our emergency funds.
Father emerged from the pilothouse without a word, brushing past me as he barked orders to his crew to prepare the hold, mentioning that they would set out again in just a week. A collective groan rose, but none dared protest, and I took their silence as my chance to speak up.
“Mother’s alive,” I said, holding up the papers.
A handful of the crew glanced back in surprise, as if they hadn’t even noticed me standing there. The man closest to Father gave him a nudge, but he just brushed it off and kept walking. My voice rose louder.
“I said—Mother’s alive!”
By now, even the other fishermen along the dock had taken notice, pausing their bait-and-hook preparations to watch. Father turned then, and I tried to hand him the pages, but he slapped them from my hands and grabbed my shirt, shaking me.
“She’s dead, for God’s sake,” he yelled. “Jumped off the pier and drowned herself. So stop talking about her ghost, or I’ll have you sent away.”
His words barely registered before his eyes, entirely gray, void of pupil or iris, broke over me like surf in choppy water, tumbling me again and again before finally spitting me back out. And I knew then that the man who had once taught me to read the tides and name every fish had already slipped past reach, drowned in some lightless gorge.
The weight of that loss pressed deep into my chest as he released me and stalked away, his crew following in silence, save for the youngest, Tayan, a sixteen-year-old boy with a gentle face and long, mopped hair. He lingered a bit, watching me with both curiosity and unease—the way he always did when he thought I wasn’t looking—before reaching down to pick up my notes. He read the first few pages before returning them with a sorrowful look.
“I don’t need your pity,” I said.
“I know,” he said softly. “But your dad’s just trying his best to keep everyone fed.”
“It’s not like I’m trying to make things hard for him, it’s just—”
“Your mother’s still alive?”
“I’m not joking,” I said, clenching the pages. “I’ve seen her messages. It can’t be anyone else.”
I watched Father’s boat bob against the dock and couldn’t stop the thought from creeping in. If I could just stow away and prove it to him, then he would have only his eyes left to argue against.
Tayan stepped closer. “Chako... I know what you’re thinking.”
But I knew him as well as he knew me. I pressed on, sensing him draw nearer, like a fish circling the bait. “I won’t tell anyone you helped me. And I’ll deal with Father. Just let me try. Please.”
He hesitated, reading the urgency in my eyes. “I’m not afraid of your dad. But if anything happens—”
“I’ll be careful,” I said, cutting him off, pointing to the coordinates. “Just steer us here, okay? Let me see it for myself, and I swear I won’t bring it up again.”
The wind tugged at his hair as he weighed the risk. Then he exhaled, and I knew he was hooked. “Fine. But you stay hidden below deck until I say otherwise.”
I couldn’t help it. I threw my arms around him, spinning us once through a tangle of crab pots and nets. He patted my head gently, but his smile faded as his eyes drifted toward the gray, churning water, darkening by the minute, where the next boats struggled through the chop.
✷
Father’s boat was a broad-beamed steel trawler, her hull streaked with salt and pale green barnacles. And inside, everything had its place—from the coils of line wrapped tightly against the bitt to the storage bins stacked in perfect rows, each one organized by its contents: tackle with tackle, nets with nets, knives with knives.
Which was why it took Tayan nearly two hours to find somewhere to hide me. He finally settled on one of the mid-level storage crates, emptied of old fishing gear, and as I climbed inside, the last things I caught were Tayan’s worried face and the faint sweetness of diesel. Then he lowered the lid, and the light vanished, replaced by the low groan of the trawler readying to push off.
It could have been hours or days that I sat there in the dark. Tayan came by a few times to hand me food and blankets, but mostly I slept, the deepening cold drawing me into dreams of a calm night in the bay. The new moon left the water black, and Father and Mother had taken the old rowboat out, the one with the squeaky oarlock, laughing quietly each time the silence broke with its sharp cry.
Far from shore, Father pointed to the stars scattered above us, saying that, despite their distance, they were born of the same brine as every creature in the sea. And to prove his point, Mother dipped her hands into the tide, letting the water swirl around her fingers until it glowed an electric blue. Then she began naming each tiny point of light.
“This one is Nanuq,” she said. “And this one, Aki.”
I reached toward the lights in her palm, and as they danced between my fingers, I felt enormous—to touch a piece of both the sky and the sea at once. And that feeling kept me afloat on the darkest nights after she was gone. The same love that led her to name everything, the same warmth that stopped me from plunging in after her, even when Father’s silence made me wish I had.
But a scream made me feel small again as it tore through the wind above deck. The trawler lurched violently, throwing me against the crate’s side. I tried to ignore it, but when my stomach threatened to turn inside out, I pushed open the lid and climbed up the ladder toward the hatch. Through the crack I saw coolers and ropes scattered in disarray, and Father shouting himself hoarse as the crew lined shoulder to shoulder, struggling to keep their footing while waves slammed against the hull.
“Who was it?” he bellowed. “Who steered us into this damned storm?”
He asked three more times before his eyes landed on Tayan, who couldn’t bring himself to look up. “Was it you?” Father demanded. And I knew Tayan’s silence was all the proof he needed. His fist rose, and before I could stop myself, I burst out, shouting that Tayan had only followed my lead.
Three crewmen held Father back, but not before his blow caught Tayan’s cheek. I flinched, knowing I might be next, if not for the wall of foam that rose from the sea and fell over the vessel, swallowing us all whole before spitting us back out.
When the water cleared, less than half the crew remained, six of the original twenty-something. The rest were gone, either already drowned or soon to be, tossed helplessly by each crashing wave. And just as it seemed the worst had passed, someone shouted from the starboard rail that something was circling the boat. Another joined him, squinting into the water before letting out a scream.
“Grayback!” he cried, the name carrying through the wind like a curse.
The sea heaved, and a ridge of gray-white flesh rode the second wave, torn and shredded as if half-devoured. It blotted out the sky, then crashed, swallowing the trawler in darkness. And through the shadows, someone stumbled over ropes and equipment, slamming a hand on the deck lights. When they flared, only three of us remained: Father, Tayan, and me, all slicked in a black film like squid ink.
Around us, hundreds of dead fish—lingcod, rockfish, salmon—lay across the boards, bellies torn, some mangled as if by a shark or seal, while others looked disturbingly human, with two arcs of flesh bitten clean away. Tayan saw it too and pulled me close, his hands trembling as he rigged a safety line. But all I could feel was a bitter regret washing over me. I knew Father would blame me; claim I’d damned us all by refusing to let go of Mother. And maybe he was right. Maybe the messages weren’t hers at all, but a trap meant to lure us here to our own undoing.
Yet, amid that all-consuming black, a faint glow rose from the water. Father saw it too and leaped down from the upper deck, snatching two harpoons. Without a word, he thrust one into Tayan’s hands and loaded the other into the rail-mounted launcher, his jaw tight, eyes locked on the light that now surged toward us with terrifying speed.
As it drew near, Tayan fumbled with his weapon while Father leveled his aim. But before he could fire, I saw something behind the brightness: a contoured shadow, like the outline of a face.
“Wait!” I screamed. “There’s someone inside!”
The light swelled outward, flooding the deck in a white so pure it burned through the black film covering our skins. And there, floating within it, was my mother’s face. Her high cheekbones, her dark thinning hair drifting as if underwater, her eyes closed as if caught mid-dream. Seeing her should have brought relief, but the frozen stillness of her, as if she were dead, set an alarm ringing in my head. I had wanted proof, yes, proof that she was alive and hadn’t abandoned us, but not like this. Not with her trapped in some impossible space that turned the blood in my veins to ice.
I waited for Father to react, to notice how strange it was that she was suspended above us, but his attention never left her face. And when she finally opened her eyes, he reached for her, arms wide and desperate. But no matter how close he came, she hovered just out of reach, always a breath higher.
He kept moving forward until the water beneath her surged, revealing that the rest of her had fused into a single stalk of flesh, rising from a ridged, decaying back that was no longer hers alone. Her body had become part of Grayback, impossibly melded into an appendaged lure hovering above its gaping mouth. Father cried out to her in horror, but only Grayback answered. Its jaw opening to reveal rows of teeth glistening with viscera. If Tayan hadn’t fired first, driving the harpoon deep into its side, Father would have been devoured whole.
But still, I couldn’t look away. Because the real terror wasn’t her disappearance, or the cancer that had wasted her away, but seeing her grafted onto a living horror of darkness and salt. A creature the rumors mis-described as a whale or giant fish, its skin a grotesque patchwork of every land and sea creature that had ever drowned, scales pressed against flesh, fins fused with limbs.
And with a single, massive flipper, it hauled itself onto the deck, tipping the trawler’s bow deep into the water that now reeked of chum. Father clung to the mast for his life, and I crawled along the safety line toward his harpoon, leveling it at Grayback as its mouth opened beneath him.
At first, I struggled to find a target. My eyes darting past its tongue which writhed like a dying fish, until I fixed on an immense, whale-like eye staring back at me. The dark muscle around it twitched as I aimed, revealing the whites in a panic so painfully human that my fingers froze on the trigger.
And then I saw it wasn’t alone. Faces of humans, birds, otters, and seals pressed against the inner lining of its throat, trapped behind what looked like encrusted coral or driftwood. At first, I thought they were corpses until the deck lights swept over them and their eyes met mine. Unblinking, terrified, still alive. Still fighting for that last breath that would never come. And then I understood: something inside Grayback was keeping them alive, keeping their minds conscious enough to hold on to the instant before death.
I looked back at Mother, desperate to see if any part of her remained, hating myself for hoping when I knew she might be better off gone. And as the flesh around her shuddered, her expression warped with it, shifting from drowning grief for the trapped bodies to a fearful awareness as her eyes found us. A worry that confirmed she was still there, caught in the memory of who she had been.
The same woman who had sat by my bedside when I was small, awake long past exhaustion, refusing sleep as she mended the nets I had torn to shreds the day before, insisting I could catch more than Tayan and all the other children combined. A care that had never scolded, and now hung above us, reaching out so that we might free her and all the others while there was still something left to save.
Guilty that all I could offer in return was this small mercy, I steadied the harpoon and aligned it with the creature’s throat-eye.
And pushing with everything I had, I whispered, “I’m sorry.”
The harpoon slammed back against my chest and struck dead pupil. Blood erupting across the deck in a geyser as the creature wailed. A sound so vast I was certain the trawler had finally split in two. Then as Grayback convulsed, a flailing tide of arms and legs, tangled with nubbed flippers and claws trying to anchor themselves against the fall, hundreds of other voices joined it—human, animal, lost, afraid—all rising in a single anguished release.
I tried to cover my ears to muffle the cries, my heart aching with the weight of all that pain. But as Grayback tore at itself, the deck slid beneath my feet, and I caught sight of Father clinging to the stalk that bound Mother, hacking at it desperately with his knife.
When the last strand gave way, we all plunged together into the cold, thick water. Grayback’s skeleton, a massive driftwood carcass of a once-great tree, illuminated by the lights from the sinking trawler. While above that abyss, Father held Mother close, refusing to let her float away.
I kicked through the water toward them, but stopped when I saw the look on Father’s face. He was finally himself again, his eyes once again a soft brown, free of the fog that had haunted them. Mother’s face, too, mirrored his relief, no longer twisted in pain but relaxed into the loving smile I had missed so much. And in that moment, nothing else mattered. They had found each other again, and that was enough.
Only then did I understand what had driven Father all this time. They had argued, and he had let her walk away alone, trapped between his desperate need to protect her and the quiet resignation that her illness was carrying her some place he couldn’t follow. He had lived inside that mistake ever since, dragging it behind him like an anchor, as if the endless searching might punish him enough to make things right.
But now, with her finally in his arms, they sank together into the dark water, and I let my eyes fall shut, ready to follow—when an arm wrapped around my ribs and yanked me upward. I broke the surface, gasping, and Tayan surfaced beside me, retching black, brackish water.
“We’ll make it back,” he said between breaths. “To the bay, to town. I’ll find the way.”
But there was no horizon and no landmark. Only open water for miles out, and I could hear the panic rising in Tayan’s breath as he searched in every direction, struggling to keep us afloat in the rolling chop. And just when it felt certain we would be pulled beneath the waves, a single pinprick of light rose from below. Then another. Soon, thousands of tiny white lights swirled around us, glowing like stars scattered across a night sky.
I felt my parents then, and the others with them, everything that had come apart inside Grayback, all the grief the sea had been carrying for years. They hadn’t been souls lost, as my mother’s stories had warned, but souls held under by people like me and Father, by all of us who had kept crying into the dark because we couldn’t bear the loneliness that followed loss.
Tears stung my eyes as we swam through all that suffering, thick as gelatin setting around us, pressing heavy against the waves so that each crash sunk us a little deeper each time. Then it scattered among the lights, thinning as we moved, carrying us not toward it but away, until our feet finally touched sand.
Then, the water closed behind us and went dark. Quiet until the next winter, when another batch of driftwood floated back to shore carrying strange letters. Though this time, I left the wood where it lay, knowing now how such things are made.
✷──────────✷──────────✷
A.A. Reyes is a speculative fiction writer who has spent most of her life moving from one environmental field job to the next. Along the way, she has drawn on encounters with talking rodents, reptiles, and insects to explore how strange life can be. Her work has appeared in The Colored Lens and Flash Fiction Magazine and is forthcoming in Kaleidotrope. @bitbiologist
