Fall 2025 - Vol. 22, Issue 4

I should probably start with the seashells. Not the ordinary kind you find washed up near the pier, chipped and barnacle-pocked, with sand clinging in wet clumps, no. These shells are maps. Maps carved in raised dots and ridges like Braille, except sharper, almost painful if you run your finger too long over them.

I have a box of them under my bed. The box used to hold shoes, cheap sneakers with green stripes. Now it rattles every time I slide it out. I tell people it’s coins, or bolts, or screws, anything but what it really is. Because if anyone knew… well, they’d either laugh or confiscate them. And both feel like death.

You know when people say maps show you where you are? That’s not right. Maps show you where you could be, which is more terrifying. The shells rearrange themselves sometimes. I don’t know how. I fall asleep, and in the morning the ridges bend differently. One night the coastline curves north, the next it dips south. My fingers read them like rivers shifting in sleep.

I wasn’t supposed to collect them. They started turning up after the tunnel.

The blackout happened two summers ago, during a school performance. I was sixteen and dumb enough to join karaoke night. That’s how bad it was: I figured if I sang awful, maybe no one would focus on my stutter. Smart move, right? But the mic cut the second I spoke. Whole building went dark. Not even the EXIT signs worked. The crowd panicked, rustling, whispering, coughing in the dark.

And me? I sang anyway. My voice cracked and shook, but with no lights, no faces, no pressure, something came out that sounded almost beautiful. I swear, for those three minutes, the blackout wrapped me in freedom. When the lights returned, everyone stared. Some clapped. Some didn’t know what they heard. And me? I laughed. Loud, messy.

That was the first time I realized darkness can be a gift.

The tunnel came later. It’s this half-abandoned train tunnel near the edge of the forest. My chair doesn’t like gravel, but I learned to push the wheels hard, to bounce over stones until I reached the flat rails inside. The tunnel breathes with damp and rust. When you shout, the sound circles back in ways that don’t match your words.

I spray paint warnings there. Orange, red, acid green. Words like DON’T SLEEP and WAKE UP and THE FOREST IS WRONG. No one listens, obviously, but I keep doing it. Because once, inside that tunnel, the air vibrated like a throat. And I swear, I heard singing. My singing. Not an echo, not repetition, but me in another time, warning myself. That’s when the first shell rolled toward me from the dark.

It clinked against my wheel. I picked it up, cold and damp. Raised ridges all over its spiral. I pressed it to my ear out of habit, expecting ocean noise, but instead my fingertip read a coastline.

That’s how the box under my bed began.

Okay, okay. You want the witch part, right? Fine. There’s a witch. She lives in the old shed behind the train station. People think it’s storage, but I saw her once through the slats, crouched low in her chair, muttering to a broom locked to the wall with rusty chains. The broom twitched like a chained dog, jerking against iron.

I didn’t speak to her that night. I thought I imagined it. But later, when the shells piled higher and the maps started repeating strange forests that don’t exist on any GPS, I went back.

“You keep touching what doesn’t belong to you,” she said when I rolled up. Her voice rasped like smoke. “The shells aren’t toys.”

“They found me,” I said.

“They always do. And they always ruin us.”

I didn’t feel fear. Not really. Maybe it was her face... familiar, not a mirror, but close. Tangled hair, gaze too intense. But the way she sat, stiff-backed in that chair, the set of her jaw like she never stopped fighting... it matched mine. Words came slow, like living wasn’t the same as being safe. I knew her without knowing. Recognition tastes like trust.

She told me the broom isn’t for flying. At least not the way fairy tales say. “It carries maps,” she explained. “Maps carved by storms. Each shell is a piece. If the broom rises, the whole sky will change.”

I laughed, maybe rudely. “You’re saying this broom is a weather satellite?”

She frowned. “I’m saying the world writes itself over and over, and some of us are forced to read it.”

I remember shifting in my chair, restless. “So what do you want me to do with these?”

“Burn them. Before they finish telling you where not to go.”

Of course I didn’t burn them.

Last winter, I followed one. The shell showed a forest path bending north, away from the highway. I traced the ridges again and again until my thumb hurt, then I packed snacks, water, spray paint, and rolled toward it.

My friend Nira came too. She doesn’t usually. She hates the tunnel, says the air tastes metallic. But she said, “If you’re going to vanish into some cursed trees, I’m not letting you go alone.”

We argued at the edge. She said the wheels would sink in mud. I said the shells wouldn’t lie. She said they always lie. I shouted at her, loud, ugly, but then she helped push anyway. That’s what care and resistance looks like.

The forest was wrong. I mean… the trees leaned closer than they should. Their branches hung like crooked arms. My wheels left dents in soft earth, but every dent filled itself in behind us. That scared Nira more than anything. She whispered, “The ground’s healing.”

I didn’t answer. I wanted to believe the shell, not her.

At the center we found another tunnel, smaller, more like a throat in the ground. Graffiti sprayed itself along its mouth, words in my own handwriting. My handwriting! I hadn’t painted them, but there they were: DON’T GO. STOP. GO BACK.

Nira looked at me with panic. “Tell me you didn’t.”

“I didn’t,” I said. My voice cracked.

Inside, I heard it again: my blackout song, the one from karaoke night. Only slower, dragged out, like a warning stretched across miles.

I wheeled closer. The air thickened. The tunnel pulsed. And then the broom appeared, dragging itself along the ground like it had crawled out of the shed. Chains still dangling.

The broom’s bristles left trails of glowing sand. Each trail hardened into ridges, ridges that matched the seashell maps. It was… drawing. Transforming.

I froze. Nira screamed.

The broom finished its line, lifted once like a bow, and collapsed. The sand glowed, then dimmed, leaving a final shell behind.

I picked it up. The ridges spelled only one word: SING.

I didn’t want to. My throat clenched. Nira shook my arm. “Don’t do it. Don’t.”

But I sang anyway. Same song as blackout night, but broken, cracked. The tunnel trembled. The ground hissed. My chair jolted forward an inch without me touching it.

The broom rose into the air, jerking like a bird trying to escape. The chains clanged, then split. Sparks flew. And the broom took off, dragging sand lines across the ceiling, redrawing the whole sky.

The forest shifted around us. Trees straightened. The dents behind my wheels stayed dents this time. Nira gasped. “You fixed it.”

“No,” I whispered. “It fixed me.”

Because something uncoiled in my chest, something that had been stuck since blackout night. Like the song wasn’t trapped anymore.

We left the tunnel with the broom still scratching at the air above. The shell in my pocket pulsed like a heartbeat. I ran my finger over the word SING cut into its side, again and again, till the tip went cold and numb.

That night, I dragged the box from under my bed and flipped it open. Shells spilled out, rolling, settling across the floor. They aligned into one giant map, one I had never seen before.

It showed the forest, the tunnels, the shed, and then… home. My home.

The final ridge line bent into my own name.

And I laughed. Not bitter this time. Not afraid.

Because for once the map didn’t show where I shouldn’t go. It showed me. It proved I existed.

Nira doesn’t believe the shells are finished with me. She thinks another tunnel will appear, another broom, another blackout. Maybe she’s right.

But last week, when the power went out across the neighborhood, I didn’t hide. I rolled out into the street, lifted my face to the dark, and sang again. Neighbors listened, confused at first, but then… some joined. Off-key, messy, human.

And the strange thing? The shells in my pocket stopped rearranging that night. For the first time, they stayed still.

So maybe the witch was wrong. Maybe the shells don’t ruin us. Maybe they wait for us to ruin ourselves, and if we don’t, if we dare to sing anyway, they finally let us rest.

Title sits here, sharp as a blade, but I know what I’ll call it: The Cartographer’s Blackout Song.

Because that’s all I am now. A cartographer of dark, a singer of maps, a witch’s twin. And I’m not burning the shells.

I’m keeping them. Because they kept me.