“Starve the Sea”

©️ 2026 Written by Shelly Moore

www.LimitlessStimulus.com

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A dark maritime folktale of love, grief, and the terrible things that refuse to let us go.

Literary horror · gothic fiction · supernatural folklore

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The lighthouse beckons to ships in the night. Both its shores and operator beaten by weather and isolation.

On calm days, the sea still batters, chipping away bits with each blow.

On stormy days, it throws punches one after another with brass knuckles.

His beard unkempt and hair long and disheveled, he cleans the soil from beneath his nails with a toothpick as he listens to the jovial song of the gulls overhead.

He’d been jovial once.

Another lifetime ago.

He notices the thick mud caked on the side of his boot and turns his foot sideways to wipe it on the grass.

He retrieves a worn plastic baggie from one pocket and a cob pipe from the other.

As he cleans the pipe with the same toothpick he’d used on his nails, thoughts slowly roll through his mind like approaching thunder.

The blue dress’s broken shoulder strap. The wine-red paint on her toes. The feeling of her delicate hands on his beardless face.

The gardens she’d planted are overgrown now, but small reminders remain.

Hydrangeas surviving where hydrangeas should not.

She’d brought them from inland, from the old house.

He’s tried to protect the others, but the sea is both giver and taker, and what she wants, she gets.

The storm of ’86 was particularly brutal. Nearly seventy-five feet of coast taken by her in the blink of an eye. Thunder was loud and lightning was frightful, but the sea…

When she rages…

Hell hath no fury like hers.

He’d lost a boat that year. The only boat that brought them back inland. Luckily, an old friend had thought to come out a few days after the storm to check on them.

Otherwise, they’d have died on this island together.

He often wishes that’s how it could have happened.

But instead, the sea took her away from him.

He puffs tobacco through the pipe and settles deeper into his chair. He watches the seabirds dive and retrieve their breakfasts, and inhales deeply the salty spray of the giver and taker.

He can’t seem to remember her laugh anymore.

Not like he used to, anyway.

The edges of that memory have been chipped away by time. He curses under his breath and takes another puff.

The gulls cry out.

The sea gently batters the island’s cliffs.

The sun reflects off her surface.

He thinks maybe… just maybe… the sea loves him so much that she became jealous when he’d found love in another human being.

And in her fury, she beckoned to her.

Come to me…

Come to me…

She’d whisper in the woman’s ear.

She’d mentioned hearing her just days after moving onto the island, as he returned from tending to the lighthouse.

“She calls to me… her voice carried on wind and spray… her laughter echoes through the gulls’ cries…”

“Oh yeah?” he’d joked, though her demeanor was that of a faraway mind, not a comic. “What’s she sayin’? Maybe you can ask her which bluff to fish from for the best catch.”

The woman did not laugh, nor did the corners of her mouth shift in any way whatsoever to form a smile.

She simply stared off into the sea, over the horizon, and said,

“She calls to me.”

Weeks passed.

One warm summer night, as the nearly full moon reflected brightly over the water’s distant, calm surface, the man and woman lay nude in the grass beside the lighthouse after making love.

He watched as her eyes shifted from his own to the sea.

“She callin’ you again?” he joked.

She nodded, her eyes fixed on the water.

She sat up, reached for her cardigan, laid it over her shoulders, and drew her knees to her chest.

“She calls every night… just whispers. I feel her breath on my skin.”

“Are you sure it’s not mine?” the man said as he sat up beside her and began to kiss her neck.

Her gaze toward the sea did not falter.

“It’s her,” she whispered resolutely.

The man, shrugging off her words once again, continued kissing her neck and shoulders.

The woman continued.

“She says come to me… and sometimes I want to…”

The man could take no more of her ramblings and shut her up by pressing his mouth to hers.

They made love again under the stars while the sea watched, then fell asleep in the soft grass beneath the moon.

Just before the sun began to poke its bright head over the horizon, he opened his eyes and reached for her.

His fingertips met only the morning’s dew on blades of grass.

He rubbed his eyes, yawned, then sat up groggily.

“Where’d you go?” he called out without urgency.

Maybe she’d woken early and gone inside the house to prepare breakfast and tea.

He stood, grabbed the blanket they’d laid on, tucked it under his arm, and headed toward the small house.

As he entered, he called out to her again.

No reply.

He relieved himself in the bathroom, splashed cool water on his face and beard, dried off with a small hand towel, and quickly looked into each of the five rooms.

Unconcerned, as she often kept her mornings for herself, he made his way to the lighthouse. He opened the door, climbed the stairs, and when he reached the top landing, used the tall vantage point to try and locate her on the island.

She wasn’t on the north side, nor west.

The south side seemed empty as well.

He called out for her, but only the gulls and sea replied.

He tended to the light, checking all that needed checking, wiping what needed wiping, before returning to the landing to search the east.

Which is where he found her.

On the rocks fifty feet down from the bluff above her.

A blue dot on a rocky shore.

His mind couldn’t seem to process what it was seeing at first. He assumed it was some sort of tarp washed ashore.

Nonetheless, he flew down the lighthouse stairs and ran toward the bluff.

As he reached it, he saw clearly that it was not, in fact, a tarp.

It was her.

In her blue dress.

One shoulder strap broken, her body more so.

On the ground beneath a stone, paper fluttered lightly in the wind.

She calls to me, and I must go.
She’s alive, surely you must know.
She breathes and she mourns,
She laughs, cries, and scorns—
Her voice carried on the winds that blow.

You must hear her, my love, as she calls
Every night when she quiets the gulls.
She’s alive… she’s alive…
I feel her inside…
Her voice rattles inside of my skull.

She says you belong to the wind and the sea,
Says there’s simply no room here for me.
While you sleep your soul wanders,
And her soul hungers.
You meet and make love as we sleep.

I dare not question her, darling, for she is Sea.
She’s older and stronger than you and me.
Her word goes.
I can’t tell her no.
When she beckons, I obey helplessly.”

The man dropped to his knees and cried out.

“No! I am not yours! She belongs to me! Bring her back… bring her back to me,” he wept.

Thunder rolled in the distance and the skies began to darken.

“I’ll throw myself off this cliff, you wretched beast! Watch me!”

The man, with the note clutched tightly in his hand, ran toward the cliff’s edge and threw himself off.

But he didn’t hit hard ground as he expected.

He hit water.

A wave had risen to catch him, setting him gently back atop the cliff’s edge.

Clothes soaked, he wiped seawater from his face and shouted,

“No! No! You cannot have me!”

The gulls cried out loudly and circled overhead as thunder rolled and waves crashed against the shore below, carrying away the battered, lifeless body of the woman until he lost sight of her.

The man lay upon the grass for a long while, crying and pounding the earth with his fists.

Lightning cracked overhead and thunder shook the ground beneath him.

He stood and faced the sea.

“You will never have me as you wish!”

He returned to the house and retrieved a shotgun from its cabinet.

He loaded it.

Aimed.

And as he did, lightning struck the lighthouse.

It shook the house so violently that he dropped the shotgun.

He fell to his knees and wept.

He stood again and walked resolutely to the lighthouse door, stepped inside, climbed the stairs and made his way to the landing.

Rain fell in thick sheets. Lightning cracked all around. The sea battered the cliffs and chipped away at the coastline.

“You cannot have me!”

He climbed over the railing.

And let go.

Just before hitting the earth, a forceful gust of wind lifted his body and settled him onto the ground with gentle ease.

“No! No!” he cried out, defeated.

Many moons passed.

The man learned to hear the sea as she spoke to him.

He’d often dream of the woman he’d lost. He’d dream they walked the lighthouse grounds together, hand in hand, and made love under a blanket of stars and moonlight.

But he knew it wasn’t her.

It was the sea.

Wearing the woman’s likeness as he dreamt.

And here he sits today.

Picking the soil from beneath his nails with a toothpick and wiping his muddy boot in the grass.

He calls out quietly, yet resolutely, to the sea.

“You’re clever, but I think I’ve outsmarted you.”

The gulls cry out above him.

“You laugh, but I feel it in my bones, old friend.”

Waves pound the shoreline and sunlight glistens from the water’s surface.

“You may control the wind and water, old girl…” he says. “But there are things I control that you cannot.”

The gulls fall silent.

The waves withdraw.

“You give and you take, but I have choice… and I think today I’ll leave this island for good.”

The gulls cry out louder than ever.

“You can laugh all you want, but I’ve beaten you. I’ve beaten the sea,” he says with a weak chuckle.

“A human body cannot live without sustenance, old friend. And you cannot force me to eat.”

The gulls shrieked noisily overhead.

The man chuckles under his breath.

“I can feel my body shutting down. I don’t think I’ll last the night.”

Thunder begins to roll in from the horizon.

The skies begin to darken.

Fish begin to fall at his feet.

He laughs.

“You can give a man a fish, but cannot force him to eat it, now can ya, old girl?”

The thunder intensified.

The skies grew black as night.

The man smiles weakly.

He lies upon the grass and closes his eyes.

Inside, his world is calm.

Outside, a storm with more rage than he’s ever seen ravages the island.

The wind takes the roof from the house and sends siding into the sea. Waves batter the coastline and swallow chunks of land whole.

The man laughs, eyes closed.

“I win,” he whispers.

He hears glass shatter nearby.

The wind howls.

The sea churns.

He feels his body lift beneath the wind’s force and feels the wetness of the sea touch his back.

The sea cradles him high in the air as she destroys the lighthouse, its house, and its island.

The man smiles, eyes closed.

“You cannot take this from me,” he says.

And as he does, the sea slams him violently down into her waters.

The storm ends just as suddenly as it began.

The island no longer visible.

All that remains… is a single muddy boot, floating upon the ocean’s surface.

And then she takes that, too.

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