The Whale by E.A. Garfield

The whale washed up on a cold night in the middle of November.

They were perching on the cusp of winter, waiting for the snows to start and trying in vain to ready themselves for another few months of salted fish and old vegetables. And, well, the whale was the biggest fish any of them had ever seen.

It was the Sly children who found it, after they’d slipped away from their mother and come down in coats and hats to do whatever children did on beaches late at night. And they had seen it, silhouetted against the stars in the sky, a great, heaving, shape. And then they had fetched their father, and he had fetched other fathers, and soon the whole village was down on the little stretch of beach.

Nell knew the men were discussing how to start cutting at the thing, trying to decide how to get the meat off of it. She didn’t like it. She’d wrapped herself up and come down alongside the rest of her family, but she’d had a bad taste in her mouth since Willie Floyd had come to their door and bid them come down to the beach.

She wrapped her arms around herself, and kept separate from the others. There was a glee in them that she didn’t like. The children ran around, yelling and giggling, and the women had set a fire and sat around it. Nell’s mother sat with little Michael on her knee, bouncing him up and down while he laughed raucously, his pink mouth open and showing his two little white teeth.

Down the beach, the men were smoking. One of them held a pitchfork, though Nell couldn’t imagine what for.

“Look!” one of them shouted. “The eye!” He pointed up, and up and up. Nell followed his finger until she found the huge, gelatinous eye of the whale, focused on them. Seeing, not blind, not dead, seeing. Nell’s heart beat fast in her chest, but she could not tear her own eyes away. They all looked at the whale, and the whale looked back at them.  

***

It was the children who started leaving things for it. Small things, rocks and weeds, pulled up with the roots, left within sight of the thing’s huge eye. Then Margaret Sly gave her son a bottle cap to leave, and people followed suit. Old fish hooks. Dried leaves. Lucas Mcdowell left a belt buckle, shining silver, glinting. The Macgregor’s left an old leather baby boot, in fine condition.

It confounded Nell. She felt that everyone else knew something she didn’t, like she’d missed something. She avoided the beach. Her own family avoided going as long as they seemed able to stand, and then took one of Reef’s old writing sets, a pen nib each. Nell stayed home, and gutted the fish.

“It’s something about its eye,” Anika said to her, after they’d all come back. “Something about the way it looks at us, I don’t know. Maybe we feel bad for it.”

Nell looked down at the fish she was cutting, into its own silver, terrible eye. She didn’t see anything in it. It was just a fish.

Then the Keyes lost their baby.

Nell had known Jocasta Keye her whole life, had gone to her wedding. The whole village grieved for them. But there were whispers. I heard they lost it because they didn’t leave a gift, Anika whispered. Their mother had shushed her and called her a fool, but Nell saw the way they all looked at Jocasta when she came around to visit.

Nell felt as if they’d built a wall around themselves, and she wasn’t allowed to pass it. They drew into themselves, huddled around one another. They cast glances at her when they thought she wouldn’t see, and sometimes when they knew she would. 

She went down to the beach and sat on the dunes, far away enough that the whale was small, grey and harmless as a stone. She could smell it, even from so far away. It was rotting. The Sly children passed by her, walking back to their mother’s house, hands in their pockets. They looked pale and slimy as the inside of a gutted fish, their eyes big and dark and watery. Nell looked back at them. When she got home, she took one of her boning knives and tucked it into her skirt.

***

Anika gripped her hands so hard it hurt. She’d been babbling since she got home, Nellie, Nellie, it’s so cold, I want to go live inside that thing, come with me, we’d be so, so warm, it’d keep us warm. Their mother stared at them from the doorway. Nell did not want to go inside again, despite the cold.

She pushed her sister toward the house and started walking. She told herself she didn’t know where, but she did, of course she did. Where else was there? It was a small village. There had only ever been one place to go.

Alexander Owens had requested they take him down to the beach, when the cold had finally started to take him. They’d just laid him down on the sand next to the thing, like a coin or a shoe or a piece of liquorice. Another gift for the Whale.

Nell thought about the Keyes’ baby, about watching her being lowered down into the damp earth, and about the next baby that might die in the village. How likely was it that they’d bring it down to the beach, and lay it next to Alexander Owens? How long would the winter keep them both pale and intact before they finally rotted away?

How long before the Whale rotted away, she thought, and they were left with only bones? It’s still alive, something whispered to her, it will always be alive. It’s skin was grey and dry as a stone.

She did not look it in the eye, but she felt it looking at her, felt it as she walked all the way down the beach and back home, shivering.

***

Nellie dreamt of drowning. And then of burning, hot and fast as a dry leaf. And then she dreamt of the damp earth pressing down on her, the dirt getting in her mouth and her nose and her throat. And when she woke, she was not as afraid as she should have been.

Her mother stood over her, stern and terrible, though that didn’t feel any different than normal. “Anika has taken a fever.”

“It’s because of all the time she spends down on that damn beach,” Nell heard herself say, her throat raw and her voice cracking. “It’s too cold for a little girl to be out in that.”

Her mother ignored her, simply handing her something - a single, silver earring. Nellie wondered where the other one was. “Take it down to the beach. I know you don’t like it, Nell,” she said, when Nell opened her mouth. “But take it. And stay there till morning.”

So Nellie went. She had always been a good girl.

She set the earring down on the sand and sat between the Whale and Alexander Owens’ now long dead body until she saw the sun rise on the horizon, and even then she kept sitting. The light was cold and weak, a watery yellow. She had the feeling that something bad was going to happen, had already happened, had happened many months ago and was now catching up to them.

Their father came and got her around noon and told her that Anika had died. He had been crying, she could see, but did not cry now. Neither did Nellie. They just sat next to their big, almost-dead whale and looked out at the sea.  

***

The night they buried Anika, she dreamt of eyes, all trained on her. Take it, take it down to the beach. Anika’s little corpse, white as the inside of a clam shell. Her eyes, terrible and silver as a fish’s eyes, bulging and ready to pop.

***

Nell’s hand had frozen in a fist around her boning knife, her skin red and chapped and almost burning from the cold. It was early, too early for anyone to be out. Except for her. She’d always woken first. Good and obedient, a good girl. She clutched her knife to her and walked the length of the beach, her boots crunching on frosty sand.

When she reached the Whale, she thought I should say a prayer, and then she thought I should curse this thing, but she could not bring her lips to move. She was cold, and angry, as she so often was. As she had been since this thing, this big, grey, sea-curse, had come to them. She thought of herself, wrapped in her mother’s purple shawl, standing on the beach and looking into it’s Eye. She looked at it then, still big, still gelatinous, still terrible, but she saw nothing in it. It was dead, really, dead in the eyes, though it still breathed.

The first thing she thought when she brought the boning knife down on its skin was: Perhaps I should’ve used something bigger. Boning knives were meant for delicate work, which this was not. This was big and messy, an undertaking meant for ten men and their axes. But she persisted, hands slowly warming from her labour.

The thing did not move, or keen or whine or yell, as she took from it strip after strip of thick, grey skin. What a meal they would all have from this, she thought. How warm it would keep them.  

The blood began to pour thickly just after the sun had set itself high in the sky. I should have brought a bucket, she thought, as it was washed away by the tide. It could have been used for something, and she was nothing if not resourceful. Or so she had found.  

She turned back to her work. She kept cutting. It was slow, methodical. Cruel, perhaps, but necessary. The people of the village would soon come along the beach to find her, she knew, and perhaps to kill her. But they would not go hungry. They would not go hungry again for a very, very long time.

She knew now, why this thing had come to them. Their Whale, their god-fish, come to tear their lives apart. Their sea-sacrament. Nell kept cutting, and cutting, and eventually she would reach bone and be done. Eat me, it said, eat me, eat me.

Fresh fish, Nell thought, fresh fish for the village. Her hands had begun to blister and bleed. Fresh fish, she thought.

………………..

E.A. Garfield is a young writer from Scotland. She is currently studying history, but hopes to write full time at some point in the future. Her first publication was in Literally Stories in March of 2020.