quill: add flash-fiction-draft.md

wizard-work/quill/flash-fiction-draft.md

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+Title: Last Cartography of the Tide
+
+The lighthouse still ran on a 1978 diesel alternator, which was fortunate: the
+grid had been underwater since 2041, and solar cells on the lantern room roof
+were crusted with salt. Maren climbed the spiral stairs each dawn, pulled the
+starter cord, and listened to the engine catch — the same three-note rhythm her
+grandmother had taught her to recognize.
+
+"Third pull," her grandmother had said, breathing through a paper mask in the
+last hot summer. "Never fewer."
+
+The beam swept across a grey Atlantic that had swallowed three coastal towns,
+a highway interchange, and the old amusement park. Maren kept a logbook in the
+generator shed. Each page was a date and a number: meters of erosion measured
+against the cliff face. The cliff lost an average of forty centimeters per year.
+The lighthouse would topple into the sea by 2072, probably sooner.
+
+She didn't mind. She had known this since she was twelve.
+
+What she minded was the silence. The coast once held five villages; now it held
+one keeper, a weather station that broadcast automated reports to no listeners,
+and a flock of gulls that nested in the generator room rafters.
+
+One morning Maren found a bottle on the tide line. Inside was a handwritten
+note on waterproof paper, rolled around a pebble: "If the light is still on,
+we are still here. — K."
+
+She tucked the bottle behind the logbook. That night, when the beam swept the
+dark water, she imagined eyes on the horizon watching it pass. She added a new
+row to the log: "Found contact. Erosion unchanged."
+
+The next morning she put the boat in the water. It was the first time in seven
+years she had rowed beyond the reef. She carried the bottle in her pocket. She
+rowed east, into the sunrise, toward the last uncharted depth on her grandmother's
+map.
+
+She did not return by dusk. The light kept turning. The engine kept its rhythm.
+Three days later, the weather station recorded a new signal — Morse, transmitted
+on a frequency no one had used since the century turned: a location, a name,
+and a single word: "Found."
+
+The logbook entry that night read: "Erosion this week: 0.6 m. Contact confirmed.
+Next step: repair the pier."
+
+The beam swept on. The water rose. The keeper rowed home.