Issue 133 October 2024

The dead whale washed ashore with a hole in its stomach so wide you could drive a truck through it. Clarence came with other parents to stare at its size and smell its briny rot and wonder how something so large could have ever been alive in the first place. He shivered when he saw the skin worble like a guitar string. Something was moving, formicating, inside.

A dozen children poured out from the hole in the whale’s side, dripping with viscera and laughing tremendously. They tumbled into the sand, panting and chasing one another. One boy threw a handful of foul ooze, and it sailed through the air, breaking into droplets that rained down on all the children.

Clarence’s son and daughter tumbled forth from its belly and cartwheeled across the beach. He called for them from the splintering boardwalk above the dune and they turned to him and waved. A mom near him cleared her throat loudly until she noticed her children within the whale, too.

He’d heard once that the risk of beached whale corpses was their exploding. The pressure of death built and built inside them. The hole in the whale meant the children were safe from bone shrapnel.

He stayed on the boardwalk. The swell of children running into and out of the whale grew. So did the crowd of parents. His daughter crawled back inside, a bloody katabasis. Minutes later, she poked her head out of the sockets where its tremendous lazy eyes used to roll before the seagulls ate them.

They were here for the summer because he was a bad husband, and only the summer because he was a mediocre father.

Kim, why? He’d asked beneath the recessed kitchen lighting.

Because it’s dead, she’d answered.

The divorce was smooth, like slipping beneath the water’s surface. The children chose their mother, and he chose the beach house.

“Jesus Christ,” one of the parents said, and everyone agreed but no one moved.

The children were ecstatic by the water and the whale. A group of boys pushed a mound of sand up near the whale’s side, and all the children began to help. Soon, great sloping steps led up the whale’s side and the children could climb the sagging creature’s exterior.

Strangely, he felt he was a better father now that he wasn’t married. The distance from the kids made loving them more urgent and therefore easier. He loved them better but knew them less.

Parents, seeing their children high in the air, became certain it was time to remove them from this great and dead thing.

Clarence walked slowly. Most children came to their parents’ call. The ones that didn’t were carried like surfboards or pulled by their ears.

Up close the smell overwhelmed him. He wondered why the children were so happy in the mess. After most of them were collected, Clarence and the calmer parents gently told theirs it was time to leave.

His daughter, 8, took his son, 6, by the hand and they slid down from the whale, his son laughing.

“Do we have to?”

“Absolutely. We’re getting lobster rolls tonight and you both need, conservatively, an hour shower each.”

He carried his son in one arm and held his daughter’s hand with the other. Both of them spent the whole walk looking back at the whale.

When they got home, he hosed them off. The pink and black sludge congealed and ran toward the sewers, dripping from their wet heads and skin. In the shower, more ooze slicked from them, combined with the foaming soap. They only talked about the whale. Neither child explained its appeal, but they shimmered. When he put them to bed, they were asleep before he closed the door.

He stared at them in the semi-dark and remembered them both as babies, wondering how anything so small could ever be alive. He wasn’t a great father, but he wanted to be. He walked down to the beach and stood at the edge of the whale’s body. The smell was so strong he had to swallow hard to keep from vomiting.

The moonlight sieved through thin clouds. He stepped into the stomach. The dark encased him along gnarled walls. He sat and thought about his children’s laughter and wished he understood it. He inhaled deeply.

Another parent soon crawled through the opening and sat down beside him. More came. Each sat, smelling, staring, crying, all trying desperately to understand what made their children happy, hoping that whatever song the whale had once sung, that their children had heard ringing from its corpse, would reach their ears, too. They listened, terrified that the pressure of life might blow a hole in them, too.

The whale shook. The clattering voices of children gathered round the whale and each adult smiled as they picked their child’s voice out. Noticing their parents gone, they’d come to help them hear.

The whale moved. Impossible, but true. They listened as their children grunted and shouted directions at one another through the rotting blubber. They stayed inside. They had not heard the song.

“Forward,” his daughter shouted, and Clarence beamed. The whale heaved. The ocean grew louder.

“Pull!”

Water seeped into the whale through its thinned skin, then lapped through the hole in the whale’s side.

“They’re going to drown us,” someone said. A few worried parents tried to hurry out but found their children guarding the exit with kitchen knives.

Clarence did not move. Even as the cool water reached his ankles. He hadn’t heard the whale’s song. He wanted his children to be happy. The water came up to their necks. He inhaled deeply as it rose above their heads. He listened as water filled his lungs. Within the dead whale he waited, children impossibly pulling them all into the sea. In the drowning midnight Clarence heard his children’s laughter as a melody. Good, he thought, as the whale and everything within it was lost to the sea. Good.

* * *

Ⓒ Spencer Nitkey