The voice note ended with the sound of the sea

Dear Delyara, My younger brother worked on cargo ships. Before every long voyage, he sent me a voice note because he knew I hated goodbyes on the phone. The last one is forty-nine seconds. He complains about the food, asks me to check on our mother, makes a terrible joke, then says, “Okay, Ate, I’m going. Listen.” For the final eight seconds, he holds the phone toward the sea. You can hear wind and water against metal. His ship sank six weeks later. I have listened to that ending hundreds of times. Not his voice. The sea. I do not know why I keep asking the thing that took him to speak again. Our mother cannot listen to the recording. She says the water at the end sounds hungry. Tonight, I played it beside the shore where we grew up. The waves here are gentle. Children were still swimming. Vendors were packing umbrellas. Nothing looked capable of swallowing a ship. I put the phone against my chest when the recording reached the last eight seconds. For a moment, two seas existed at once: the one beside me, and the one my brother wanted me to hear before either of us knew it would become the last place he was alive.