by Nicole Tan
The whale is a bleached body spilt on the dunes, a long way from the sea. How did it get this far inland, among the sedges and marram grass? Its flank is ripped open, the flesh around the wound frilled with pink, innards missing.
Nobody else has seen the whale because of the lockdown. These dunes are out of bounds to people. People are out of bounds to people. You shouldn’t be here either. But you’d lost your phone—no, you’d flung it away, then panicked and went scrabbling through the sand for it. Instead, you found the dead whale. Its hide is rank with slime. What drives you to crawl through its gaping wound, sliding between the flexible ribs? Why huddle in the scoop beneath its backbone, in the balmy stew of decomposing cetacean flesh?
You can’t answer these questions yet. But this frothing marinade of stale brine and rot overwhelms you and you pass out. When you wake, the cavity has expanded. The stench isn’t so bad now. The ribs have grown higher and stouter, the bones lengthened and arched into beams.
Does this mean anything to you? It doesn’t matter. You decide to stay. Shelter in place. You sleep and you wake and you sleep and the hollow of the whale continues to change. The cavity keeps widening and soon, an apple-shaped globe begins to grow downward from one of the vertebrae, suspended by a rosy stem. The apple learns to glow, getting brighter each day until the interior of the whale is washed in honeyed light and you become a tired, preserved thing in amber.
The cavity becomes a cavern. Florets of chalk bloom from the bone pillars, before softening and turning meaty. Oysters too, colonising bone. Grapelike clusters descend from the spinal rafters. The grapes flush bright pink like bioluminescent chandeliers. They are spongy between your teeth. You should go home. Your parents told you that you should go home to them. Isn’t it good to have someone out there looking for you? You prise the oyster shells apart and swill down their briny sinew.
Something of a breeze brushes past your face. There is wind in the whale. There is water moving in its walls. Hidden rivers in its flesh. Life has begun to usurp this carcass. The whale is no longer dead.
For the first time in days, you venture outside. The hole in the whale’s flank has shrunk, the edges less ragged. Now you must wrench your waist to one side and slide one leg out at a time to slip through. You go all the way down to the sea, toeing the high tide mark, sketched with black kelp and cockle shells. Sandpipers and plovers and silt-hued dotterels dig for snails at the water’s edge. The sea dribbles at your feet. It has the glossy dead sheen of a seasoned liar. It also has tides full of shrapnel. How else could it fling a whale all the way to the dunes? And then to prove your point, it spits something at your feet. Your phone. The screen, webbed with cracks. Too damaged to turn on.
Who would you call anyway? Your parents, maybe. They told you to come home and you said, later. The borders closed and all the flights got cancelled. Is this your idea of later, they asked. Did you even try?
Back at the dunes, sand erupts in fine, gritty fountains from the whale’s blowhole. You walk a long loop around its back, past the tail flukes. You don’t want to see its open eyes holding you to account. Or its jutting jawbone, or its flinty, baleen smirk.
So I’m not alone after all, it might say.
What are you doing here, it might ask.
Why did you bring me back to life?
Instead, you squeeze back in through the wound of the whale.
The hanging apple is far too large and bright now, swelling and deflating and swelling again. Black, larval shapes squirm beneath its luminous surface. Something wants to be born here.
You back away from it, towards the far end of the cavern, until you are beyond the reach of its light. You have never walked this far into the whale before. On and on you go, along a dark passageway. There are doors of bone and blubber on both sides. You open one of the doors and step into a room of vines and hummingbirds. A stunted tree sprouting in the middle of the room, lush with yellow leaves and persimmons. There are more doors opening into coiling intestinal hallways, leading to more rooms. Some of the rooms are circular, extending endlessly upward into darkness, like giant pipes. The whale’s breath howls through these pipe-rooms, rising and falling. Other doors open into chambers completely blocked by solid tissue. One of the rooms has sand dunes in them, just like the dunes outside. Sedge and coastal tussock. Seabird eggs crunching beneath your steps.
You miss the dark wet hollow of the dead whale when you’d first climbed in. You should have gone back to your parents, sheltered in place with them. But who is to say that there isn’t a room in this body where they are waiting? That there isn’t a different way back to familiar shores? Who knows what shores lie within the enigma of this body, within which you’ve marooned yourself?
The entrance is now little more than a slit. If you want, you can still push through and get out. Something hammers against the walls of the whale. On and on, a steady beat. In this body there are rooms full of wind and cellars full of thunder. Every muscle you tread upon is taut with ozone and salt and adrenaline. One day you just might find a room that clatters and clenches like the ventricle of a heart, rowdy with an excess of life.
For many nights, the whale’s dreams have been percolating into your sleep: heaving kelp meadows and the shadows of boats and silver, pelagic freedom. The banging grows louder. It’s the sea. The tide has come in at last and the surf is shredding through the dunes. Haloed in bioluminescence, you watch the hole in the whale inching shut, the flesh knitting itself back together. The whale tenses and you brace yourself as well, waiting for the waves to come closer, for the sea to spurt from its blowhole.
Nicole Tan is a Malaysian spec fic writer, immigrant and exhausted single parent living in Aotearoa New Zealand. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Anathema, Umbel & Panicle, Translunar Travelers' Lounge and the Year's Best Aotearoa Science Fiction & Fantasy Vol. 2. You can find them on Twitter @moxieturbine.
