12/09/2025
✨ The Lantern of Lost Names ✨
Every dusk the town’s old lamplighter walked a little slower. He carried a brass lantern that never burned—only hummed—filled with slips of paper instead of light. People said it held things the town had misplaced: a lost mitten, a forgotten laugh, the word someone once promised to say.
One evening, a tired teacher knocked on his door. “My brother left years ago,” she said. “I can’t remember his name.” The lamplighter opened the lantern and, among scribbled grocery lists and ticket stubs, a single clean slip drifted out. On it, in a looping hand, was a name that hummed like home.
She read it aloud. The lantern glowed—soft, like memory—and for an instant a child's shadow walked through the lamplighter’s yard, laughing under the maples. The teacher smiled and tucked the slip into her pocket. “Names,” she told him, “are small anchors.” The lamplighter only nodded. He wiped the lantern’s rim and added another blank slip inside.
From then on, whenever someone in town couldn’t find a thing that mattered—a promise, a tune, an old bravery—they would stop by, and the lantern would cough up what was lost. But the lamplighter warned one thing: “You may find what you miss. You may not like what else you remember along with it.”
That night the teacher kept the name in her pocket, but she also kept the memory of the laugh. Sometimes, she said later, remembering both felt like wearing two warm coats at once.
What would you go back for if you could ask the Lantern of Lost Names?