Whale

It shone white and gleaming. The whale appeared overnight, and the town burst with talk in the morning. Surprise-talk, which soon curdled to fear, to anger, and later to pretending the whale never came. But it did. That morning I had woken up before my mother and father and had come outside like answering some call, bare feet dipping easily into the dry yellow dirt, tip-toeing around the briar shrubs yearning to nip my heels. There. It was out in the field and nearly the size of our house. Father called the fire department with the finality of a man who’d met his match, didn’t have answers for his children and so had moved on to some new and remote stage of senescence. The fire department came in, expecting a prank, but then called the mayor. Throughout the day people came by. I got the closest I could that morning at sunrise, was able to press my palm to a wide piece of rib, thicker than my thigh. Cold, something thrilling as my hand grew colder, felt the hard unyielding surface, something serious. Then I was back in time — I was six years old, and I came across some cattle carcass buzzing with flies. This cow had wandered far and died of thirst by a saguaro cactus that stood sentinel. Its chest had split open at this stage of decay, was writhing with the things that lay claim to what we all eventually leave behind. I had reached, slipping my fingers around the muck and felt the cow’s rib, my hand coming away tinged brown-red like old wound, and it was a loss-feeling, as I came to know then that the time when the bone is able to be touched is when it has ceased to be a bone at all. I wanted to steal a piece from the whale so I waited until sundown. I knew the plains the best, and when the sun goes down, the dirt and sand meant I was invisible. I stole a gnarled joint from the very end of a flipper and kept the cold piece in my pocket. My sister had a boy over that night and I knocked on her door to show her the bit, but she didn’t open the door, didn’t even tell me to buzz off. I pushed the door open and found the two of them trying to be one person. I made a sound, though, against my own will, but then my sister looked beyond the boy’s shoulder and heaved a chapter book from her bedside table at me, hissing a curse. The book’s impact didn’t occur to me, as I stood there, rooted; I wanted to understand, see the bones of it, because nothing was as clear to me as the skeleton outside, but half the rest of the town wanted the whale to be gone like a dream. I returned to my room but couldn’t find the piece in my pocket.

Chi Siegel is currently based in Oxford, UK, though she was born and raised in San Jose, California. She is the co-founder and Art Director of sinθ magazine, an international creative arts magazine by and for the Sino diaspora.