I found his story through LeVar Burton Reads. The townsfolk already regard the woman as strange-after all, a woman working a lighthouse?-but the fallout of a single moment threatens everything, and she has to decide what she’ll do to protect something as unique as herself.

Wasnt my favorite short story read but I enjoyed the feminist moments. It was a wild day, and we ducked inside quickly, the noise of the angry ocean swell battering on the rocks. My Uncle ducked as he passed under the tiny doorframe, its wood being eaten away by the constant winds from the sea. It really could go either way, but my tendency is to read it as the former, and as the former the story takes on a whiff of magic. The Lighthouse Keeper is part of FEN: STORIES, available from Graywolf Press. Lowry mentions a short story The Lighthouse Keeper of Aspinwall by the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Nobel prize winner for the whole of his. It was a sea cottage, nestled on the cliff side with the ocean and the rocks below. Read another way, the woman is just very lonely and isolated and doing a job that the people in the town feel isn’t right for her (as a woman) and she is projecting what could almost be a delusion out into the world. So one day, the lighthouse keeper left it and went away.

With “The Lighthouse Keeper,” Daisy Johnson walks a fine line with her main character in this regard: read one way, she is exactly the character I just described, a woman who has had an encounter with a fish, but not just any fish, a fish that’s somehow different and perhaps even fated to have encountered her. Its light shone far out to sea but no ship had passed by for years. I’ve always loved stories about outsiders, and especially those who see or feel or understand the world in some way others don’t.

The lighthouse keeper short story