Whispers in the Wind

A breeze brushed against his cheek, soft as breath, and Micah stirred beneath the thin blanket.

He blinked into the dark, his eyes adjusting to the pale cut of moonlight slipping through the blinds. The room smelled of old pine and dust—the kind of silence that had weight to it. The retreat center was still, save for the quiet creak of aging beams and the distant hum of cicadas outside.

Then—that feeling again.

A presence.

“Micah…”

He jolted upright.

He turned toward the door. Nothing. Just moonlight pooling on the floor like spilled silver. His ears strained for footsteps… for breathing… for anything. But the silence only deepened.

He lay back down, eyes refusing to close. The whisper had felt real. Too real.

The retreat had been Eli’s idea when Micah turned sixteen: a month away from chatter and screens and everything that dragged at a soul. “To learn the sound of quiet,” Eli had said, a gentle smile tucked into the creases of his tired face. “Quiet has a sound, if you listen long enough.”

Eli had been the only constant since Micah could remember. His father’s grave was a stone Micah still couldn’t touch. His mother had placed his small hand in Eli’s when Micah was four, lips pale, eyes rimmed red. “You’ll be safer here,” she had whispered, then kissed his forehead and walked into the rain. He had watched her umbrella shrink to a dot and then vanish. He had waited for years for her to come back. Eli never promised that she would.

There were good years, even laughter. Eli taught him to pray without choking on the words, to sand a beam true, to read a psalm like it was written to him. Still, Micah carried a bone-deep ache he never spoke aloud: the suspicion that if people truly saw him, they’d walk away. His mind learned Scripture; his heart learned the shape of absence.

So when the whispers came—the ones he could not explain—Micah felt two things at once: a tremor of fear… and the strangest sense of being noticed.

The next morning, Micah asked Eli if he’d called him.

Eli frowned, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “I was asleep, child.” His voice was calm, but his gaze lingered on Micah’s face a moment too long, as if searching for something.

Micah nodded anyway. That night it returned—the whisper… the breeze… the prickling sense that someone else occupied the darkness with him.

He began to wonder if he was dreaming…

or if something was dreaming through him.

On the second evening, as dusk thinned into night, the retreat center shifted into its other life: boards settling with soft sighs, the chapel’s glass windows darkening to liquid midnight, the long hallways breathing the cold. Micah paced the dormitory with socked feet, counting the knots in the floorboards to anchor himself. He caught himself checking Eli’s bed—watching the old man’s chest rise and fall—like proof that something in the world was reliably present.

When the lights went out, the room did not so much darken as deepen. The breeze came—cool, almost fragrant, as if it had passed through fields he could not name. He curled into the blanket, gripping the edge, and whispered a child’s prayer he hadn’t prayed since he was nine.

He dreamed—he must have dreamed—of a doorway that opened onto nothing and yet was impossible not to enter.

On the third night, Micah saw it.

A flicker. A shadow. A movement like a person stepping just out of sight near the far corner.

His breath caught. His skin iced over.

“Who’s there?”

No answer.

But the air changed—dense, electric. As if the room were suddenly too small to contain whatever had entered. The breeze withdrew. The darkness thickened, like gathering rain.

And then—

The presence came.

A pressure—gentle, yet irresistible—pressed against his chest, and the bedsprings murmured under him. His heartbeat stuttered, caught between terror and wonder, as though he were standing on the edge of a cliff and being invited to fly.

A voice, inside and outside his skull—vast, intimate, impossible:

“The house of Eli is falling. You will rise where he does not.”

Micah gasped and folded to his hands and knees. His vision blurred; tears spilled—hot, startling. They carried grief that didn’t belong to him, grief as heavy and ancient as stone.

And just as suddenly—

it was gone.

The room returned, ordinary and dim. The hum of the vent. The moon on the floor. Eli asleep, hand open on the blanket as if reaching for a dream.

Micah’s breath shook as he crawled back beneath the sheet. He stared at the ceiling until the ceiling became a sky he wasn’t sure he could live under.

At sunrise, Micah sat with Eli at the breakfast table. His fingers shook around the warm mug, though he hadn’t touched the tea. Outside, the last of the night fog dissolved along the tree line.

“You spoke with Him,” Eli said—not a question.

Micah swallowed. Nodded.

“What did He say?”

The words pulsed inside him like a second heartbeat, threatening to burst free. Speaking them aloud felt like choosing a future he wasn’t ready to choose. He stared past Eli at the window, where a moth tapped softly at the glass, trying to reach the light already shining on the other side.

“It… it was about you.”

Eli didn’t look surprised. He stared into his hands—hands weathered by prayer and time, knuckles pale, a faint tremor at the thumb. Micah suddenly noticed how thin Eli had become, how the collar of his shirt slouched against a neck that was more bone than muscle. The man who had held the world steady for Micah now seemed held together by will and blessing.

“Let it be as He wills,” Eli murmured. “He does nothing without purpose.”

Micah studied him—the slump of his shoulders, the sorrow tucked behind his eyes. How long had Eli known this was coming? The question felt too large to ask.

“What do I do now?” Micah whispered.

Eli looked up—and for a moment, Micah saw something like pride… or relief… or fear. He couldn’t tell.

“You keep listening.”

A breeze lifted the hairs along Micah’s arm.

The window was closed.

His pulse stumbled.

That afternoon, while Eli mended a frayed hem in the chapel, Micah found the old man’s prayer journal tucked beside the hymnal shelf. He didn’t mean to pry. He meant only to move it out of the dust. But when the leather slipped open in his hands, he saw his name—sketched in a thin, careful script—more than once across the pages.

Lord, if it is him, steady my hands.

If it is not, cover his ears.

Do not let my love for him blind me to Your voice.

Micah closed the journal, throat tight. He had always believed he was a burden that Eli had chosen to bear. It had not occurred to him that he might also be a prayer that God had chosen to answer.

He returned the journal to its place. When he turned, he found Eli watching him from the front pew, needle idle in the linen. The old man did not scold. He only held Micah’s gaze with a sorrowful tenderness and said, “I have asked for you to hear well.” Then Eli lowered his head, and the needle shook in his fingers as he threaded it again.

That evening, Micah stayed outside past curfew, walking the path that looped the retreat grounds. The pines towered like dark choirs, the air cool and sweet with resin. Fireflies stitched unsteady constellations across the grass. He stopped by the small stone dedicated to Eli’s late wife—a woman Micah had only known through stories—and traced the carved name with his fingertip. How many losses could a man hold and still stand upright?

He knelt. Not because he felt holy, but because his legs were tired of holding up everything he didn’t understand.

“Lord,” he said clumsily into the night, “if it’s You—please don’t pick the wrong person.”

A thrum of wind moved through the trees, gentle as a hand passing over his head. He stood, blinking, and a moment later heard footsteps on the path. Eli approached slowly, favoring the left knee the way he did on damp evenings.

“I shouldn’t be out long,” Eli said, easing down onto the stone. “Storm in the bones.” He chuckled, then winced and pressed a palm to his chest until the breath evened out. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. “When I was a younger man, I thought God spoke only to the strong. But He doesn’t. He speaks to the listening.”

Micah swallowed. “I don’t feel strong.”

“Good,” Eli said. “You’ll be less tempted to trust yourself.”

They sat together as the last orange softened out of the sky. When Eli stood, he swayed—only a fraction, but enough that Micah’s hand shot out to steady him. Eli smiled at the gesture, patted Micah’s shoulder, and returned to the dorm with steps that were careful the way old bridges are careful.

The fourth night did not creep; it arrived.

Dark leaned over the windows and exhaled. The cicadas fell into sudden quiet. Somewhere in the building, a door settled with a sound like a low note plucked from a cello. Micah lay awake, counting his breaths, then forgot how, then remembered again. Sleep skittered at the edges of his thoughts but would not stay.

He sat up. The room pressed around him—not unkindly, but insistently, like a teacher leaning close. Eli’s breathing was shallow, lips parted, one hand fanned over his heart as if to keep it from wandering off. Micah watched him for a long time, then looked away because love is sometimes hard to look at.

The breeze returned, carrying with it a scent he could not name: not the resin of the pines, not the dust of old hymnals, but something like first rain on dry earth. His skin lifted in gooseflesh. The corners of the room softened; the air took on a low shimmer as if a veil of heat was rising from stone.

“Micah.”

His name.

He turned his head. In the corner, something gathered—a brightness without a source, a darkness with edges. For an instant, in the angle of that not-light, he thought he saw a boy his own age, barefoot, eyes clear as the chapel’s glass. The shape tilted its head, listening to him listen.

“Who’s there?” Micah breathed.

The shape did not answer. The room did. The pressure returned, not brutal, not cruel—immense. Micah felt very small and very seen, like a single grain of sand that had just realized the beach knew its name.

The voice moved through him.

“Listen, son of dust. What I say will stand. The house of Eli is falling, for he did not restrain what should have been restrained, and the weight has found the beam.” A hush—then, like a hand on his shoulder: “You will rise where he does not.”

Micah’s chest ached. Not from fear—though fear was there—but from the shock of a love so pure it burned. He pressed his palm against his sternum and felt tears fill his mouth with salt.

“If I rise,” he whispered, “keep me near.”

The presence withdrew, leaving the room intact and changed, like a field after lightning—grass still grass, sky still sky, but the air forever holding the memory of fire.

Eli stirred. His eyes opened, clouded at first, then steady. “You heard,” he said.

Micah nodded.

Eli looked at him a long time. “Then let it be as He wills,” he said, almost to himself. He turned onto his side, grimaced, and tucked his hand beneath his cheek the way he had when Micah was a child afraid of thunder.

At breakfast, Eli ate little. He favored tea over toast, pressing the cup between both hands as if to warm them from the inside. A slight tremor traced his fingers. Twice he reached for the jam and then set the spoon down, mind drifting elsewhere.

“Do you… want me to tell you exactly what He said?” Micah asked.

Eli smiled without showing his teeth. “I knew the bones of it before your father died,” he said softly. “Some doors open years before we notice we’re standing in them.”

Micah stared. “Before my father—?”

“Your father asked me to take you if it came to it,” Eli said, eyes on the steam rising from his tea. “He said you would need a place where the floor held. I didn’t understand then. I do now.” He lifted his gaze and placed a hand over Micah’s, the tremor still there but the grip warm and sure. “I have always asked God not to waste my love on you. He hasn’t.”

A weight lifted—one Micah hadn’t named because he hadn’t known it was there. He pressed his other hand over Eli’s in answer.

“Eli,” he said, and the name carried more years in it than it had the night before.

Micah didn’t sleep the next night. He watched the shadows instead—wondering which one might move. The breeze returned. The whisper did not.

He sat up, heart pounding, eyes locked on the darkened corner where the figure had stood before. Something shifted—barely visible—a ripple in the air like heat rising from asphalt.

He whispered into the silence: “Did anyone else see that?”

No reply. Only the soft sifting of wind around the window frame, tracing the syllables of his name across the room.

Micah.

He stood and crossed to Eli’s bed. The old man slept, though not deeply; a line of pain traced his forehead, and his hand once more had drifted to rest over his chest. Micah adjusted the blanket and turned to go, then paused. Eli’s lips moved. Micah bent close.

“…steady his hands,” Eli breathed. “Speak, and keep him listening.”

Micah backed away, the prayer warming him like a coal slipped into his coat pocket.

Morning broke clean. After chores, Eli went to the chapel—later than usual, slower than usual. Micah followed, stopping in the doorway when he saw Eli kneeling at the rail, fingers interlaced, shoulders trembling with the effort of holding himself in place. The old man did not see Micah. Micah did not interrupt.

He watched as Eli lifted his head and let it fall back again, a man yielding to a tide he’d long known was coming. It was not despair that crossed Eli’s face, but a kind of acceptance that was older than grief.

When Eli finally rose, he leaned on the pew to steady himself. He made it halfway down the aisle before the tremor in his hands spread to his arms. Micah reached him in three steps.

“I’ve got you,” Micah said.

Eli’s smile was wind-worn, lopsided, true. “I know.”

They walked back together, slow, one careful footfall at a time.

That evening, clouds shouldered in from the west. The sky darkened early, the first threads of rain stitching along the eaves. The retreat smelled like wet stone and wood soap. Micah moved through the rooms closing windows, checking latches. In the dormitory, he paused, hand on the sill, thinking of the nights when the breeze had found him anyway.

He turned—and saw, just beyond the edge of vision, a shimmer, like a door swinging soundlessly on a hinge no one could see. It might have been a trick of the storm light. It might have been more.

He didn’t chase it. He let it be.

“Micah,” Eli called from the hall, voice thin but steady. “When the wind picks up, the east gutter overflows. Would you—?”

“Already on it,” Micah said, and it felt like stepping into a sentence that had been waiting for him since before he knew language.

He moved toward the door, then glanced back at the corner where the shimmer had been. The air was ordinary again. The room was only a room.

Only.

He lifted the window a fraction. Rain threaded in—cool, clean, alive. It brushed his cheek, soft as breath, and pooled on the sill like spilled silver.

He did not know whether the calling would mark him or undo him. He did not know whether the promise meant rising like sunlight or like smoke after fire. He did not know what it would cost.

He only knew one thing:

Tomorrow night, the wind would return.

Whether or not it carried a whisper, he would be ready to listen.

And in the quiet that followed, the question lingered—not heavy, not cruel, simply honest:

Had he been chosen…

or had he simply learned to hear?

The room did not answer.

But somewhere inside the silence, a presence turned its face toward him, and the air held the memory of a voice.

Who’s there?

Only the rain replied.