By Amie Lightfoot

The river was endless.

It stretched like a vein of black glass through the dark, wide enough to swallow sky and shore alike. The air smelled of iron and salt. Each pull of the oar echoed like a heartbeat too slow to belong to the living.

The horizon was a seam of shadow stitched shut against dawn.

No stars marked its surface—only the lantern on my prow, its flame guttering with each dip of the oar. The dead rode silently behind me, as they always had. Their eyes empty. Their mouths still. I never asked their names. I never gave mine.

For centuries, this was my rhythm: dip, pull, dip, pull, shore, release.

But tonight was different.

She sat near the bow, not folded in gray silence like the others. Her hair shimmered faintly in the lantern glow. Her eyes were soft, luminous with something I hadn’t seen in centuries. When I turned, she was humming. The sound struck me like a blade of light. A child’s song. A mother’s hymn.

This little light of mine…

The oar wavered in my hands.

The song was thin at first, tremulous as candle smoke, then steadied into something achingly familiar. Each note folded over the next like hands clasped in prayer. Warmth. Or was it pain?

She looked up and smiled, and for a moment I saw my mother—not her face exactly, but the tilt of her head, the same stubborn gentleness that once scolded me into prayer.

“You’ve carried so many,” she said. Her voice was quiet, yet it filled the boat. “But never yourself.”

My throat closed. “The ferryman does not cross.”

Her gaze did not waver. “The ferryman is also a soul.”

The river surged. Waves lapped against the hull, oily black, whispering in voices that were not voices. Halfway to heaven. Halfway to hell.

I gritted my teeth. “I made my choice long ago.”

She leaned forward, eyes catching the lantern’s fire. “No. You stopped choosing. That’s not the same.”

Her words tore something open in me, and memory spilled like floodwater. My mother’s hands, worn and calloused, cupping my cheek. Her lullabies. Her desperate prayers when I went astray. The shame that followed me to the grave.

Lord knows Mama tried.

I remembered the night she sang that hymn beneath a storm, her lantern shaking in the wind, her voice lifted not for the rain but for me. Her lantern shook in the wind as though she could force heaven to answer. But heaven stayed silent.

I rowed my boat away from the shore, leaving her light behind.

The oar faltered. My breath came ragged.

The woman’s hum grew steadier, wrapping the boat in fragile warmth. “Why do you row, century after century?” she asked.

“Because I wasn’t worthy to stop.”

The lantern flickered, throwing cracks of gold across the black water. In the ripples, I saw not shadows, but fragments: my mother’s face, my own younger eyes, the life I left behind. The whispers rose louder: One foot in the fire, one in the light. Which way will you pull?

I clutched the oar, trembling. My arms burned with the weight of centuries, with the futility of endless crossings.

“If I cross,” I whispered, “where will it take me? Heaven? Hell?”

She reached into the water. The surface glowed faintly beneath her hand. “That isn’t your question,” she said. “The river remembers what you are. But only you decide what you carry.”

The boat rocked. The dead dissolved into mist, leaving only the two of us. The air smelled of ash and lavender.

I realized, with a pang sharp enough to break bone, that I was afraid.

Afraid to stop rowing. Afraid to step anywhere but here.

She stepped out of the boat and stood. The water parted around her ankles as if she walked on wings of light and flame.

“This is the last crossing,” she said softly. “Not theirs. Yours.”

My hands loosened on the oar. For the first time, I let it fall.

The current seized the boat, carrying us forward. The lantern’s flame swelled, pale and violet, glowing against my chest as though it belonged there all along. The woman’s form blurred, brightness spilling from her like dawn.

I closed my eyes. The river roared. The hymn rose with it.

And in that fragile, burning moment, I felt both truths at once—my angels and demons locked in war, my sins, my mother’s prayers, the endless weight of my penance.

Halfway to heaven. Halfway to hell.

Between us, the current steadied—no longer punishment, but passage. I felt her hand, or perhaps only the echo of it, brush my shoulder as the flame pulsed once, twice, and settled inside me.

Not empty.

Never empty.

The hymn and the river tangled in my chest—halfway to hell, halfway to heaven, and one small light still burning.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amie Lightfoot writes across genres but has a soft spot for stories that uncover the extraordinary in the ordinary. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, three kids, and cats, where she bakes, wrangles geese—both feathered and fictional—and sneaks in writing time between projects.

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