continuing with some summer-adjacent short stories to keep my creativity going :) normal poetry will resume whenever I feel like it (!!)
All summer long they’d be talking about it. It was the summer of death and dying. Things were changing all over the place — properties being sold, people moving out of state, a sense of departure and deep, hot rot. Grief had taken all the color out of my August. Life was happening all around in pointless and mundane ways while I coached myself out of thinking.
One morning Carl came running back to the house around 6 o’clock and I knew something must have happened by his pace. The marine layer hung low like a heavy blanket and by the time he reached the top of the wooden stairs he barely had breath left in him.
“Guess what washed up on the beach last night,” he said, exhaling through his words.
I stopped the faucet and put my palms flat against the countertop. “Ten million dollars worth of cocaine.”
“No.” His eyes glistened with something I then could not name. “A whale.”
“A whale?”
“Yes.”
“Alive?”
“Of course not,” he said harshly. Then softening — “No, it washed up because it died, like. Probably due to an injury of some kind, a boat or another fish out there got it.”
I felt a deep stir of discomfort behind my heart, as if a machine long dormant had finally whirred its way back to life, and looked down at my two hands. “That’s so sad. I wonder what happened.”
“I know,” Carl said. He looked out the window at the shoreline, from here visible the piping plovers that dotted the water’s edge. He had on a pair of short running shorts and a t-shirt from a Greece trip a few years ago. He looked small in the perspective of the horizon, shapeless and vague in the fog and din. Like he could be anybody.
“You know what I noticed?” I said to break up the harshness of the silence, to stop my mind from asking how long whale calves can survive without their mothers. “There’s no deer here.”
“What?”
“Remember in Fire Island? That one night, those deer?”
Even from feet behind him, before the words leave my mouth and settle like dust, I knew I’d fucked up. The tension descended from his jaw down to his toes like a mist. If I were anyone else I may not have noticed these plates shifting into place. He wasn’t facing me but I knew his eyes would be deep and dark like an animals’. And that if I approached him, even in the slightest, he’d reach back with the speed of a cobra and make me forget what I was trying to say.
“You said we’d never talk about that.”
Last summer, when Carl was still sick, they’d been taken in by a couple on Fire Island that had more rooms than friends, and they lucked out enough to spend the summer for free so long as they’d take care of the sprawling home and gardens. No matter what goodness came their way, Carl’s addiction managed to squander it. He was born into privilege and I always resented him for it. But last summer, when he was still sick, I’d find him down by the water’s edge at odd hours of the night, numbering the stars, the fish, the leaves on a tree, fearful that he’d lose count and have to start again. Every night, leading him back up the wooden stairs, out of the sticky night. So many things had happened that summer, most of which we had both vowed to forget. But how can you erase a memory? How can you undo what can never be undone?
On the night that everything happened, I came face to face with a white-tailed fawn. I said, “How did you get here?” and it cocked its head as if it was me that should be answering the question. For a moment, I felt the world suspended in its perfection, crystallized in the orbs of the eyes of this child animal. My heart lurched into my throat as I reached out, inexplicably, and then withdrew, seeing movement in the trees. “I thought you were alone.”
For days and weeks afterward it would not be the tragedy I remembered, nor his last words nor anything at all, only this moment, those two black eyes and within them every reality I could never know. I hear the sound of hooves on wet earth and the harshness of reality pulling that old me to shreds when I try to remember what happened after that.
“It’s just something I noticed.” Now my words come out smeared and smothered. In Carl’s face the past replays in flashes like through a viewfinder. Like it was yesterday, I can still see his red mouth forming the words — I didn’t know it was laced. Eyes flickering like a dying flame.
. . .
That night I lay awake until it was very late. My chest stirred with a heavy undertow. Every sound was loud to me, the crickets, the passing cars, the sound of Carl’s breath. All of it like a cosmic taunt. I stepped outside and quietly closed the front door, holding my breath and edging along the tree line like a spy. Like a thief I stole to the end of the street, across the walkway, and onto the sand. It was barely dark with the moonrise. But I needed to see the whale.