Song for a Whale

by Lynne Kelly

I couldn’t stop thinking about how many years it had sat quietly collecting dust and how close it had come to being thrown in the garbage because no one thought it was worth listening to.

“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”

The whales’ songs were like footprints they left in the ocean.

“He keeps singing this song, and everything in the ocean swims by him, as if he’s not there. He thinks no one understands him. I want to let him know he’s wrong about that.”

The pods who’d recently lost a member were the easiest to join. He knew them by their songs made of low, mournful tones, announcing their grief to the ocean. They swam with an empty space, carrying the shadow of a whale who used to be.

I was like Blue 55, shouting into the void of the ocean, at a frequency too high for anyone to reach.

Even when the water is icy, the sea can melt away a drizzly November.

No, not nothing. I touched the origami whale in my jeans pocket. At least I’d brought Grandma to the sea, and it washed away the drizzly November in her soul. She’d navigated her way through her grief. My weird, funny grandma, never content to stay in one place, who knew from the start that I should have the name of a whale.

A sound can move anything if it’s strong enough. It can shake walls or break glass. It can knock a whale onto a new path. It can pick someone up and carry her far from home where she doesn’t know anyone. The vibration of the whale song would stay with me always.