Photography by Pip Murphy-Hoyle

Content warning: minor mentions of death and whaling.

If the whale had taken his leg, maybe he would be justified in swashbuckling across the froth of the waves—spearing the whale with an anchor that could be shot from the ship like a surprise harpoon. 

Unfortunately, the whale had not taken his leg, only his sanity.

The first time he saw the whale was on a Monday, so his mood was already sour. It reached its rubber head and ice-capped nose above the coastline. A cascade of mist fountained from its lump. The sight of the sparse coastline filled with an ancient figure would have made any other resident of the town—trudging along through bronzing slush—click-flash in awe. Not Levi. He stuck his hands even deeper into his puffer pockets, turned his head towards the tiny wooden houses along the tundra, and refused to lift his feet as he shuffled away. His boots dampened to the nailbeds.

At school, he shuttered himself between a glowing screen and a plastic chair. Per usual, class chatter was aimless and wandering. Levi chose to sample pieces that caught his attention, like skim-reading but for conversation.

“The whale in the bay was a sperm whale, not a humpback.”

“It had a hump.”

Feigning ambivalence towards the whale, he turned to Ivaana and Malik. “It was a bowhead whale.”

They both snapped their heads around with bewildered stares.

“Bows?” Ivaana said, tugging on the end of her bow-adorned pigtail. Bright pink and curled like tongues. Malik laughed. Levi slunk further into the red blush of his puffer jacket.

That was not the last of his run-ins.

Every time he saw the bay, he turned his head, even if his tufts of dusty brown hair were blown back by wind. Relentlessly, Levi stretched his hood all the way over his hair and snuggled it up to his chin. His face stood out like a red moon. He heard the waves rumpled by something resembling a fin and turned his head. He heard the splash of a mammoth tail and turned his head. He heard the beep beep beep of a heart monitor. Focused on the buoyancy of container ships with cutting horns and oily blood that pumped through metal bodies ceaselessly. No use, the whale and the ships were the same. Gods of greed.

On Friday, when Levi went home, he played home video tapes of the aquarium. Schools of fish that swam aimlessly by, painted in coral and crayon shades; green sea turtles with beak mouths, chomping seaweed that waves like those air-pumped plastic gas station men; eels that slipped in and out of crevices; seahorses with curled tails and male pregnancies. Levi stuck his stomach out. Strange to have a father instead of a mother, but he supposed if he watched enough seahorses he could learn. His mum’s bob, silvery grey like fish scales, popped up on the tape. She was watching seals dart back and forth, eyes flashing blue. Her face was also blue against the blurred glass, the room dark, and she—brightly captured by the eye of the camcorder.

He sat at the kitchen bench for dinner with Dad, spaghetti strands piled high.

“What are you learning this week?” Dad said through a mouthful.

“Bowhead whales live almost forever,” Levi said, spinning the spaghetti around his fork without eating.

“Forever? Nothing can live forever. Who taught you that?”

“I said almost.”

His dad’s shoulders caved in a little. Levi knew this was a technique to make him feel bad, but he didn’t feel bad. The spaghetti tasted like a lump of mush. His tongue felt like whale blubber. Here came the crucial memory that fell from the very back of his skull—in his book about Vikings, it always fell open to a certain page about whale meat. Stranded whales washed up on shore and were deconstructed into Lego piece blocks of meat and bone and blubber. Meat for ripping teeth through, bone as planks for ivory houses, blubber to burn as boiling oil.

Ripping and burning seemed cathartic, even if the pale, round eye of the whale looked like it dripped a fat, salty tear. The Vikings were hungry, Levi was incandescent.

In the supermarket on Saturday, Levi held his dad’s sandpaper hand and looked for whale meat. Those cold red refrigerator packages seemed very different from the royal blue and grey of the whales. The harpoons that he imagined were not plastic wrapped; they were vengeful and sharper than teeth.

But he found it—the rounded slices like fat livers. Remarkably, bowhead meat, though not of the whale of the bay, which he had peered at this morning through the fog of Dad’s Honda with heated seats. Levi picked it up and tucked it under his jacket. It was a bit slippery. At the counter, he placed the meat all sly under the toilet paper rolls, where it could best be hidden. It was the same thing he had done with chocolates and gum when the whole family had shopped. Easier then, because he had winked at Mum and she had agreed to their joint deception.

“Are we seeing her tonight?” he asked, at that pivotal moment when the whale meat was scanned. His dad nodded, eyes turned away like Levi’s turned away from the bowhead in the bay.

With great difficulty, he cooked the meat that afternoon when Dad was fixing the car and imagined that the Viking way would have been more helpful because then he could offer Dad oil as a consolation for stealing the meat right under his nose. Home economics was only taught in Grade 6, so he still had a few years to go. But Dad was a terrible cook, and he managed to make spaghetti every night. His glowing screen, in its 15 minutes of permissibility after shopping, was all the home economics Levi needed. Once the meat was pan-cooked, peppered and salted, he packed it into a lunch box with SpongeBob and Patrick on the cover. They were grinning and waving with cartoonish smiles when Levi’s eyes were drawn to the cash-eyes of Mr Krabs, and his daughter Pearl: a whale with pigtails in a bubble-gum pink dress.

“Dad, can we go now?”

The car ride was silent. Did Levi’s dad know of this evil? Did he smell the meat and the sweat? Then he turned on his favourite podcast, and Levi knew he knew. Whale song crooned through the headrests to the backseat until Levi put the window right down and drowned it out with the wind.

Mum greeted him with a slight rosiness to her cheeks that hadn’t been there Monday morning. Though he was getting better at reading, he tried not to read the name of the Ward or her terminal diagnosis or the letter she slipped beneath the covers that said ‘Levi’ on the envelope. When Dad hugged Mum, she looked very small, but when Levi hugged her, he felt small, and that was better.

“What’s in your lunchbox today?” she asked.

He opened it, and her fragile face scrunched up.

“I cooked some whale meat for you,” Levi said.

“Whale meat?” she looked to Dad in confusion. “Did Dad teach you about my old job?”

Dad shook his head. “I didn’t eat the whales, hon, I researched them.”

Levi couldn’t hold it in any longer. “I hate the whale in the bay, Mum, I hate it.” Little tears—compared to the whale’s raincloud droplet—fell.

“Why?”

“Miss Lorry said in class that whales can survive for hundreds of years, and they’re currently being studied by cancer researchers because they don’t get cancer,” he said.

Mum and Dad exchanged glances and pursed their lips in an unimpressed manner. Through mind reading, they determined Mum as the one to respond to his outburst. “I know that you don’t hate whales.”

Levi stared at the hunk of meat. “I just feel so small.”

“Well, everything starts small.”

It was true. Even Vikings were babies with helmets too big for their heads, at some point. He remembered the aquarium, the schools of fish like ephemeral pastel paints trailing through the water.

Levi’s mum told him a story that was truer than his hatred for whales; the death of a whale that is not cut up into pieces of various use and sent about on ships. Ships that float on and cut through waves.

“Whales start as babies too. Then they grow up, and the sad time comes when they have to leave their mothers,” Mum said.

“I’m not leaving you.” He was as stubborn as ever.

Levi's mum creased her eyes. “Sometimes the mums leave the babies, and they explore the ocean by themselves. But you’re lucky, you have Dad to explore with.”

The second type of death a whale can have is that of a deity drowned. The deep-sea floor envelops its carcass. An ecosystem springs forth from flesh and bone worn away by swarms of creatures swimming, diving, crawling through the navy deep. And here in this great fall from immortality, the whale will be food for fish.