Ranveer Singh

No one in the village remembered exactly when people first began to pale. Some blamed it on the fish no longer returning to spawn in the river, while others said it started after the storm that flattened the chapel’s roof and drowned the town bell. Strange things had always happened there, sometimes birds flew backward in autumn, goats occasionally sang lullabies, and a boy once sprouted gills from behind his ears before they dried and fell off.

The fading began slowly, a slight lightness around edges, their shadows becoming duller, like paint left out in the sun too long; their voices became softer, like the cracking of thin leaves, and eventually they couldn’t recognise their own reflection. At first, people made jokes on the matter, not taking it seriously. ‘It’s just bad lighting, dear,’ said the laundry man to his wife as she began to vanish around the arms. ‘Too much fat in the meat,’ said Old Silvio, the healer, who sold dried flower petals and boiled ground water as treatment.

Only the children in the village were frightened. They clung to their mothers’ skirts when a pale figure passed, and whispered stories of wind spirits and soul-thieves who fed on silence.

Eventually when Felipe, the blacksmith had nearly turned translucent his wife tied a vibrant cloth to his arm to know where to place his tea. When even the cloth vanished from him, she kept pouring the tea into the empty chair. ‘He never was much of a talker anyway,’ she said, slowly chewing on her bread.

The priest suggested they were reuniting With God, just quicker than everyone else. The mayor of the town proposed to coat the pale people with ink to make them easier to find. The townspeople nodded, but no one followed through with the plan. People fading was inconvenient, not tragic. People adapted.

At the edge of the village, in a crooked fragile house where mangroves softened into mudflats, the smell of brine seeped through crackling plaster, and rain leaked through every seam, lived a widow named Mira, with withered old hands and a habit of always noticing small things. Her husband had passed away so long ago that no one in the village remembered his voice, only that he had once helped them with their leaking pipe or temporarily fixed their roof with a sail and vanished not long after the parrots had stopped singing.

Mira had no children of her own but she remembered every child’s name. She collected fallen feathers, used unique-looking rocks as paper weights, and left her cracked bowls of rice out for the wandering ghosts that never rested. She never called herself special or kind; she simply couldn’t forget.

She saw Mateo, the butcher’s quiet son, before anyone else did or, rather, she saw him begin to fade. He passed her gate one humid morning with a crab in his hand, and the sun lit his fingers like glass. His feet made no sound on the packed sand. The boats in the bay bobbed silently, and the tide crept forward like it had a secret to keep.

Mateo wasn’t sick. He still laughed at puddles and talked to pigeons perched on the fish scales left behind at the dock. But when he called out to people, they didn’t turn. When he waved, no-one waved back.

His mother said he needed to sleep more. His father said boys grew strange before they grew strong. The priest said nothing, for he had stopped speaking the names of children who faded. He said remembering the lost children confused the souls of the dead, as if they were being called back.

Mira waved to Mateo the next day. He blinked in surprise; it had been days since anyone had looked straight at him. His voice was a whisper, like sea foam sliding off rocks. ‘I had a brother,’ he said. ‘He faded when he stopped speaking. My parents still leave a plate for him. It’s always clean.’

After that, Mira began visiting those who had paled.

She walked along the mud paths lined with cracked shells and seaweed, carrying chipped bowls of soup. She sat beside doorways where people had stopped knocking, whispered names into salt-stained rooms, and left feathers beside beds that no longer creaked. Sometimes, the paled people blinked. Sometimes not. But Mira always left a small token behind; a seashell, a stone shaped like a heart, a note folded inside a fishing hook.

‘She’s collecting ghosts,’ muttered the baker, watching her pass beneath his sagging awning.

‘She always liked things that don’t talk back,’ Old Silvio snorted, while chewing on smoked eel.’

Children trailed her at a distance. They called her La Señora de los Fantasmas, the Lady of the Ghosts. They left her drawings tucked into fish crates and scraps of sea glass arranged in spirals. One girl claimed Mira was painting colour into Mateo’s body. Another said she saw him walking barefoot across the harbour, water parting beneath him like silk.

When Mateo’s feet no longer stirred sand and his voice barely touched the breeze, Mira mixed hibiscus petals with clay scraped from beneath the tide. Each morning, she painted his face with careful fingers. The red clung for a while, long enough for him to hum old sailor tunes and scatter crumbs to the gulls that screamed like women overhead.

The villagers didn’t ask where he went. Some said the sea had claimed him. Others said he had floated inland, like driftwood. The boy’s parents stopped setting a plate for his brother, but didn’t say why.

One afternoon, Mira found Mateo curled beside her chicken coop, face pale as moon milk. She sat with him until the tide rose past their ankles. She told him about a hill made of coral where names never faded, as long as someone said them each morning.

That night, it rained feathers. A lantern bobbed in the bay without a boat. A woman vanished halfway through descaling a fish. All that remained was her knife, a pool of seawater and the fish—which rose, eventually, and slipped back into the sea.

By morning, Mira and Mateo were gone. Her front door hung open, and the soup pot on the stove was still warm. The chickens had laid two eggs for the first time in weeks. Two handprints, one large and one small, were pressed into the wet sand outside, already fading along with the tide.

‘She always wanted to go inland,’ the mayor said, licking fish grease from his fingers.

‘They probably wandered off,’ the healer added. ‘Or dissolved. Same thing.’

No one searched. The priest mumbled both names during his morning litany. The village went back to hanging nets, cleaning fish, and chasing goats off the rooftops.

But the children remembered.

They whispered Mira’s name into conch shells and claimed the echo came back in her voice. They painted Mateo’s face on smooth stones and hid them beneath crab traps. A girl with sea-glass eyes claimed she heard humming behind the fish market, soft as tide foam and full of salt.

‘She sounds like a fragile, delicate flower,’ she said.

The adults didn’t ask. They had nails to hammer, leaks to patch, fish to gut, and crabs to harvest. People faded all the time.

But sometimes, quietly, when no one else was listening, someone would say a forgotten name aloud, just once, to see what would happen. And now and then, the curtains would stir, even when there was no wind.

Children still tucked drawings into fish crates. Stones painted with faces still turned up beneath crab traps. At night, if you held a conch shell to your ear, you might hear a voice that sounded like soup and tide.

Old Silvio claimed his eel smoked sweeter after whispering Mateo’s name into the fire. The mayor’s dog once barked at the waves for no reason, then sat and wagged its tail, like someone it loved had come home.

In the shallow tide pools where no one dared to step, two sets of footprints appeared side by side, just before the water washed them away.

And on some mornings, when the mist was fine and the birds flew low, some people swore they could see Mira’s silhouette moving among the mangroves, and the boy walking just behind her, scattering breadcrumbs into the calm tide.

No one spoke of it. Not really.

But they remembered to leave soup out on their doorsteps. They hung feathers above their beds. They spoke names softly before sleeping.

Because in the village by the sea, not everything that vanishes is gone forever.

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Ranveer Singh is a high school student with a big love for writing and storytelling. He has always been fascinated by how words can shape emotions, create entire worlds, and say the things we sometimes can’t. When not writing, he is usually reading, daydreaming, or getting lost in music.

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