By Sofia Bagdade
He wished he didn’t peep through the blinds. Now, he scrubbed his eyes with soap-worn fingers. All night, he dreamt of floating still in Atlantic depths. His vision obscured, limbs limp, only the cold shock feel of a near wail. Then, the haunting, melodic chords swept his body sideways, notes that rang of sunken ships and lonely voyages, bubbled streams in the grips of drowning.
His mother used to flick on the blue nightlight until a glow washed the room and play whale songs on a thin cassette. “We all sing of longing,” she ran an index finger down the vein of his forehead until sleep and song became one.
He woke up gasping, needing control, jerked the faucet desperately until the water moved only when he told it to. No swirling depths, no algae frozen arms, just this thin artificial stream, origin at his fingertips.
The sloped gray beach cabin stood tall before his perceptible memories began—the familiar sliver of sky and sea, how the sand picked up in tunneled gusts by their doorway. The low moan of the ferry shuttling day visitors to the island that felt more like his than a destination. By the end of August, all the sunburnt and beer-drunk caravans retreated to places of permanence, homes untouched by the moody reach of the sea. He enjoyed this emptying out. The shore grew more open to roam in the absence of intrusive umbrellas.
His corner bedroom had the best view of the beach, an expanse of blonde flat coiling to waves. This morning though, when the early light sliced his bedsheets, the familiar yellow distance now tainted with gray. His throat still full of subconscious salt, he crept untrustingly to the slits. There, thirty feet of elegance and blue speckles, a long body pale to land, a swath so great his eyes could barely register it as once alive.
All of those dreams under sea crests and here on his very shore a great humpback, at least the 18th doomed on the East Coast this summer. He’d never seen a whale before, coloring his imagination with woeful songs and underwater images, and yet here, on his very shore. She seemed a swirl of peaceful and disturbed, unmoored and laid to rest in a desert unknown to her body.
He imagined the sensationalized headlines, the town swarmed with camera straps and reporters with balloons for microphones. The media might name the whale “Bess” or “Marie.” There would be vigils and climate denials, there would be frenzies to control the unforgivable—a whale stranded, a bald example of our aloneness.
He couldn’t tear himself away from the blinds, where it was just him and her outline. He tried to remember a prayer for salvation or a poem that spoke of loss, but all he could hear in his inner ear were the distant rumbles of her song. Bowing down, he held silence in his spine and paused just above the white stereo beneath the windowsill. The machine glittered with dust and misuse. As if to apologize or revere an ancient God, long dead, swept away totems in drowned temples, he hit play.
The music sputtered out like exhaust does an old pipe. He cracked the window, and before the nets and descending dots of hurried limbs in the distance, he played her song.
* * *
Sofia Bagdade is a poet from New York City. Her work appears in One Art, The Shore, Red Weather, and The Basilisk Tree. She finds joy in smooth ink, orange light, and French Bulldogs.