Whalefall

by Daniel Kraus

People aren’t doors. They’re whole floor plans, entire labyrinths, and the harder you try to escape, the more lost inside them you become.

Jay doesn’t believe in God but prays like he does.

Dive bros knew Mitt drank—hell, it was how you pumped the best stories from the guy’s gut—but they didn’t know he was a drunk, a periodic jailbird, a malcontent who couldn’t hold a job more than a couple years and acted like it was a testament to his principles. Principles: a nifty excuse for being an asshole.

Jay thinks of AP English, Dante’s Inferno, the inscription over the gates of hell: Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.

The suicide clip chimes. No matter how rough this entry, Jay can’t lose the bag. How else is he going to carry his father’s remains?

Belly flop like another of God’s dropped boulders. But regression to gills and fins comes quick. Or is it evolution? Were legs a grand mistake?

“Did you know sailors and angels are homophones in Hebrew?”

The ocean is like this; it seems to grow human beings asexually.

Yes, it’s got to be nitrogen narcosis. How else to explain how the starfish have turned into actual stars?

The giant squid’s still there. But it’s made a sunflower metamorphosis, bioluminescent lights glaring gold, appendages like ropes of fire.

It holds the pose: a comma in a sentence so large only gods can read it.

By acknowledging Jay, it shares that it has a soul.

Jay hasn’t found his dad’s remains yet. Or has he?

Sperm whale clicks are the loudest sounds ever made by a living thing.

Behold, a universe.

Man versus ocean. It’s not a fair fight. It never was.

It’s like the whale itself is weeping light.

(The water is where we are born and where we die)

If you can’t know what’s right in front of you, you can’t know what’s beyond you.

Heaven and hell are the same: the ones you love.

Orcas, though, inspire the worst heiliger Schauer Jay has ever felt. With their tidy, evenly spaced teeth, pillowy pink tongues, and cheerful faces, orcas look like malevolent clowns, so embroiled in the religion of death their markings resemble skulls.

The great male is deserted so it can finish the only job left after seventysome years of dominion. The job of dying.

Don’t sons have responsibilities, too? The answer is yes, they do. To hold their fathers accountable.

The infinite inside the infinitesimal.

No one carries the best parts of themselves. The best parts are those held inside of others.

Just because Beaky’s remains are lost doesn’t mean he didn’t earn Jay’s grief.

But being born is scary no matter how many times you do it.

A single life is nothing but a spark. The explosion is everything after death, the generations of reverberation. Every consumed morsel of your body, your wisdom, your kindness, your art, is another bid for perfection, a chance to get it right this time, or next time, or the time after that.

Jay didn’t find his dad’s remains. He is his dad’s remains. He breathes sleepy at last.

The refrain is but two words: and the world is the comma between them.