A whale surfaces. Exhales.
Foul air spumes thirty feet high. The droplets fall, winking with
sunlight beneath the blue sky. The whale draws a fresh breath. It flows crisp
and cool into his lungs before he slides back beneath the waves. He doesn’t
dive, just lets himself slowly sink, using his flippers and fluke only for
balance.
This whale is old, tired. He
hasn’t eaten in a while. He wants to rest. No other whales are around. He’d
been swimming with a small pod but had fallen behind. That doesn’t seem to
matter.
The water is a clear and diffuse
yellow here just beneath the surface. It glows warm from the sun and the whale
wants to hang onto that warmth. But the effort required to do so is tremendous.
He sinks a little further, his flippers stroking fitfully at the water.
Yellow light turns green,
then turquoise. The water cools a little. It’s like a vast liquid gem, flawed
with bubbles and whorls of current. There are no fish, no krill. He is at the
center of the turbulence. Then the turbulence dies away. The green water
darkens toward emerald. He sinks.
How much farther does he need
to travel to reach the krill fields? Will there be anything left when he
arrives? Will any of the other whales still be there? His flippers stir, then
still.
He sinks a little more. The
water is purple now, like twilight at the surface. But unlike at the surface,
there is no wind, no roughness of waves. The ocean has a silken stillness to
it. A memory comes. His first mate. Her flank brushed his, sometimes as silken
as this ocean, sometimes so barnacled-rough that it scratched his flesh.
The memory passes. The ocean
darkens. He drowses.
The world is black when he
awakens. He drifts through a formless void. A faint pressure in his lungs lets
him know that he will need to rise soon. He will have to breathe, and the surface
is a long swim away now.
Then light distracts him,
glittering, dancing light. He recalls youthful nights, broaching beneath a
festival sky strewn with stars. A song stirs deep within but does not pass his
throat. These lights are not stars; they are luminescent plankton stirred by
his decent through their level. And he is not young. There is no song left.
The moment is here. He must swim now or never
swim again. The surface is far away; his lungs begin to strain. Working his
fluke and flippers, he begins to rise. Then he stops. The plankton have drifted
away from him. He is in blackness again. Alone. The water is cold, cold.
All tension bleeds from his
body. He sinks. Deeper and deeper. At some point he exhales. And the bubbles
rise. In a while they will burst on the surface, and there will never be more.
