They say the old shoreline was once holy ground. Not holy in the churchyard sense, but older, deeper, like bones pressed into mud by centuries of unspoken prayers. No one builds there now. Not since the floodwaters came and never quite left.

But Judith did.

She came with her caravan of sorrow and salt, trailing loss like a bridal train. They said she had buried her husband upstate, but her eyes held the weight of many burials. She bought the shack where the deltas converged, where five drowned rivers still whispered to the sea.

The locals warned her. Not about storms or tides, but about wishes. “You can’t bury anything here without it waking up,” said the woman at the hardware store. “The earth listens. Especially when it’s wet.”

Judith smiled politely. She had no use for folklore. Just silence. But the silence didn’t last.

First came the tremble of floorboards at night, like something shifting beneath. Then the dripping sounds, when the pipes weren’t leaking. On the third night, she found her childhood doll in the garden, though she’d lost it in Ohio forty years ago.

On the seventh night, the earth sighed. It was low and long, like a mother in labor.

In the morning, Judith stepped out barefoot. The soil was soft and breathing. All around her, the riverbeds had cracked open like old scars. And from them, things began to emerge: memories, desires, regrets she thought long buried.

A photograph of a man she once loved. A locket she’d thrown into the fire. A letter she never wrote, sealed in blood.

They slithered from the muck, dripping with brine, crawling toward her on limbs made of kelp and bone. Their mouths opened not to speak, but to ask. As if her wishes—those dark, unspoken things—had taken form and now demanded to be lived.

And then the sea arrived. Not with waves, but with presence. It stood at her threshold, black and vast, wearing her dead husband’s face.

“As buried wishes loosen from debris,” it whispered, voice thick as silt, “the multitudes come. You called us.”

Judith opened her mouth to deny it. But instead, she wept.

Because she remembered. And because she had. And because no wish dies quietly when buried in wet ground.

The End