No one remembers when the tide began to speak.
At first it only whispered small things, fragments of carnival music, the sound of clapping from beneath the surface.
Then came her footsteps.
Soft, deliberate, the kind that felt rehearsed.
The beach was a graveyard of color.
Tilted umbrellas half-eaten by rust. The ribs of a ferris wheel caught in coral.
A horizon that never quite decided whether it wanted to be sky or sea.
No one saw her arrive, but she was always there after storms, combing through the sand as if searching for an ending.
Her costume shimmered in pieces, stitched from the debris of forgotten summers, carnival ribbons, buoyant fragments of lost toys, coins that would try to buy happiness. She carried inside her what the ocean refused to digest: the nostalgic idea of the world’s laughter.
Sometimes, when she paused, the sound of applause could still be heard from within her chest ...faint and rhythmic, like a mechanical heart still running on memory.
She appeared and vanished into low tide. All that remained were her footprints filled with phosphorescent glow, pulsing in the dark as if the sand itself remembered being amused.
The Hallow Pantomime does not speak. Her voice was traded long ago... for what, only one could speculate. Some say she gave it to the waves so they would never forget humanity’s humor.
But sometimes, at dawn, she hums through her teeth — a low, broken melody that sounds like a circus overture slowed to grief.
And in those moments, even the seagulls stop moving, as though the air itself is watching.
Inside her body, the collected relics shift and clink together like ghost maracas: a half-eaten slice of cake, a cracked phone, a plastic chip from a vanished casino. They are her memories now. Not the events themselves, but the evidence that once there was life.
She carries them not to remember, but to resist erasure.
Because everything else...the people, the carnival, the world that built her — has already sunk beneath the horizon.
Some nights, she kneels in the surf and watches the reflection of the stars ripple across the waves. They look like stage lights, distant and dying. She waits for them to blink in sequence, like the countdown before a curtain rises. But the show never begins.
When the morning fog rolls in, she walks toward it. Each step makes the air hum — the same pitch as a distant crowd inhaling, waiting for laughter that never comes.
She bows anyway, out of habit, out of faith.
And the tide applauds.