Free Paradise and Elsewhere by Kathy Page

good, he said, adding syrup and a measure of brandy into hot tea: the same for each of us, and I watched him drink first. The island was no place for a child, he said. Mere breeding was not what free thinkers such as he and I were for.
    Free?
    He said that he understood that I was sad, that words failed me, but he knew it would pass. And luckily, we had our work for the light, the routine around which all else must be fitted… Winter would come soon, bringing storms. We must eat well, gather back our strength, and put everything in order.
    Now he wore the keys at his waist and locked doors behind him. When he was away, I was bound to the bed. And yet I also worked my share, cleaning the panels of the lens, and, when permitted on the windy platform outside the watch room, I scanned the sea for ships. I explored my prison too; I found, folded and tucked into the back of the Bible an article headlined Tragic Death at East Point : Two days after the storm of November 3 rd , the battered body of the deputy lightkeeper at East Point had been found washed up some three miles south of the island, following a failed attempt to launch the lightship craft in order to aid a whaler in distress. The fate of the whaler was still unknown.
    A small key at the back of the desk drawer led me to a box containing a single photographic print of a woman who could only be my namesake: she wore the clothes I had handled, and stood against the whitewashed cottage wall, her blonde hair blurring in the breeze. Beneath the photograph was a lock of red-gold hair, and a copy of the signed statement the keeper had submitted the day following the discovery of his colleague’s body. I was sadly mistaken , he wrote, in thinking my poor wife cured of an infirmity for which she had in the past been treated. Acting impulsively during a fit of hysterical mania brought on by the storm and feelings of guilt concerning the loss of the deputy, she cast herself into the water while I slept.
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    A nd now the days shortened ; flocks of birds passed, returning north across the vastness of the ocean. I said nothing to the keeper, but thought often of Marina, whose body had never been found. Had she loved the deputy keeper, or simply been the object of his affections? I did not like to think of her as drowned, let alone murdered. Did she go into the sea? Perhaps she was like me, but able to return? Had she found her skin? Or did she swim in the awkward human way to the mainland, and make some kind of escape… Who knew, I told myself, but that she might be living with natives in the bush, or have got so far as the town and have booked her passage out under a new name. Out there on the platform, buffeted by the winds, I breathed in the cold salt air and watched the seabirds, marvelling at the way they stayed together, and at the steady beating of their wings, mile on mile. The largest birds, the mollymawks, pass without apparent movement or effort through the air; their wings fixed, just barely tilting from side to side to ride the currents like waves, they simply turn their heads the way they wish to go… Such huge birds, the mollies, yet it was as if they had no weight. I watched them slip and soar and it lifted my heart. I longed for the bird-­feeling and imagined it: the ocean and the land spread out beneath in intricate detail, but also in depth and with extraordinary focus. In my mind’s eye I saw as if from very far above the rocks the island and the tower where I myself stood looking out. The wind blew steadily to the east and the air seemed to offer itself to me. And I would not go back inside, would not endure another night with Clarence Morgan, the clockwork beneath us unwinding itself cog by cog until the next time it must be set, and the next, and the next. Ignoring his call, I climbed onto the rails, balanced for one terror-stricken moment then gave myself to the wind. Immediately I felt the new strength in my chest and back, the