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They took my eyes first. The last thing I ever saw was a spear coming right for me. I tried to move, I really did, but I couldn’t.
I’m not even sure how I got stuck, one minute I was free and the next I was trapped on the shore, with no way to push off, and no water to swim in. I knew there were creatures on land, but I guess it never occurred to me that they would be so small. Most things in the ocean aren’t as big as me, but there are still some, and the especially small tend to avoid me when they can.
I had seen humans from afar, but it wasn't until this day that I realized how horrible they were. Skin, wrinkled and discolored, covers strangely rigid bodies bent into unnatural geometric patterns. They seemed to move in a bizarre upright, stilted way with odd extra arms sticking off some of them.
At least that’s what I assume went through my eyes, I wasn’t up there long enough to really decide what the sharp rods were exactly. I assume there must have been more of them, because the pain didn’t stop there.
I don’t know exactly how much time passed, I’ll admit that I’m not used to tracking it from above water. However, I did notice it get colder after a while, and when it did the creatures seemed to lose interest for a while. That happened twice, so maybe two days passed.
When the air was hot my back ached and burned in the sun in ways that never really went away. Everything felt impossibly dry and even when the cold air came it still stung, every small movement only making it worse. The strange little men plunged their odd sharp arms into me again and again. My senses were flooded by the smell of blood seeping into the ground, no water to disperse it, no waves to carry it off. When you die in the ocean you get to feed your neighbors, and the blood is the first alert that something will soon die.
Occasionally men will take the life of a whale, but not without purpose, and it doesn’t go on this long. We are not stolen while trapped and unable to run. We are given a fair chance just as they are and we do not begrudge them their hunt. When those men take a life no part of it is wasted, they grant us the same respect as the ocean itself and we respect them in turn.
I don’t know what these men want from me, it can’t be food. Even if my body could feed all of them this is far too much work. Did they intend to use me for shelter? I’ve been told what happens to whales when they die. They supply food as their bodies sustain countless creatures who congregate upon our corpses, whole societies, generations, entire ecosystems built from your corpse as a final gift to a world so gracious as to allow you to live in it.
I don’t think that’s what they were doing. A loud popping sound echoed across the beach off and on, each time more blood spilling, a new part of my body erupting with pain. Finally in the cold they left me, but even then it barely mattered. Blood still spilled, soaking the ground, saturating the sand into a disgusting, foul smelling sludge, a cruel mockery of the world I was supposed to belong to.
I hope that some creature can gain from my body, even if it’s not theirs by birthright, it shouldn’t have to go to waste.
I drifted in and out of consciousness as my body felt heavier than it ever should have. Whales are large creatures, but before this wretched day I never really felt it. I always had the ocean, the water buoying me forwards. My weight was only supposed to matter when I was gone, just enough to deliver me to those it was promised to. I can still feel the waves lapping at my tail, as if trying to pull me back. A part of me still hears my mother’s call, wondering where I could have gone.
There is something fundamentally wrong about tasting your own blood. It was almost a relief when the final blow came. The aches faded, eventually the popping sound did too, it was almost peaceful.
I wish I didn’t have to know what came next. I really hope my blood was of use to someone, because no other part of me was. All of the meat wasted, stripped away until all that remained was a pathetic, hollow skin. My body was dragged away, unnatural bones forced inside to prop it up in a macabre imitation of the life that was ripped away from me. My mouth fitted with those same bizarre bones and forced to open and close again and again. The strange men enter my belly, but they never care to truly fill it.
They enter in a strange mockery of the wild. I would not have eaten them, but still they act as if my dead body might swallow them whole.
Some days I wish it could.
I don’t know what they get out of hiding inside my husk, it’s already in a shelter with no obvious need to hide. In recent years they don’t even care to enter anymore. All I can do is sit and gather dust as my jaws are periodically forced open and shut, open and shut. Small humans shudder at my size, I am no longer weighed down, but my spirit can’t seem to flee from this wretched place.
When a whale dies it forms its own world in the serene black of the sea floor. As your life passes many more take your place, and as I sit here staring out through glassy false eyes and chafing under the strange material that won’t let me rot, I think often of what could have been. I wonder if the fallen whales know their fate, if any part of them remains in the debris.
I don’t think it does. How can they remain whole as their flesh disintegrates, and tissues are consumed? The rot releases them as they become part of every creature they sustain, until of those are gone and they become the ocean itself, expansive and eternal to carry on the cycle as long as there is an earth to contain it.
No, I think this stagnation is unique to me and me alone. There can not be many like me, not really, or the humans would not act so shocked at my presence. Surely, I would have seen another by now if there were others to be found.
Still, there is a small glimmer of hope in my tomb. Despite all the humans do, despite all their work and all their hubris, they are not all they think they are. Nothing they do can ever be as eternal as they wish. Despite the crime done against me and the humiliation I have been forced to endure as a prize on their shelf, a part of me can never forget the truth that one day despite their best efforts I will be free.
One day, I too shall rot.