The gray whale was never dead by Gabriela Denise Frank

The gray whale was never dead

and no one I met on the peninsula was talking about it. The gray whale hadn’t beached herself near Oceanside, and no one was interested in speculating as to why. It wasn’t climate change, since global warming doesn’t exist. It wasn’t ocean acidification or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or the dwindling colonies of amphipods and benthic crustaceans scuttling across the ocean floor, which metallurgy companies are not mining for polymetallic nodules under the deceptively quaint aegis of “ecologically sustainable seabed harvesting.”

I couldn’t pass strangers on the beach without them failing to not mention that they hadn’t beheld the undead gray whale. I didn’t see it yesterday or the day before, they professed. I didn’t see it this morning or on Monday night. My youngest didn’t run right over, our blue heeler in tow. And no, our retriever our terrier our setter our pittie our golden doodle absolutely did not sniff or nose or nudge or paw or gnaw or lick it. The not-dead whale’s renown didn’t carry the glitzy freight of celebrity gossip, like the surprise visit Taylor Swift didn’t make to Molly Moon’s Ice Cream this summer, where she didn’t order a double-scoop cone, which wasn’t half chocolate caramel/half cookie dough, and she didn’t pose, sensuously caressing the melting mounds of ice cream with her glistening tongue, for local paparazzi who neglected to cover the Seattle dates of her unsold-out arena tour that never happened.

The undead gray whale, which wasn’t beached a week before, wasn’t decomposing before the town’s eyes. This grand spectacle of non-decomposition wasn’t swept onto the velvety sand by the relentless, pounding swell pushing in and in and in. The stinking, fly-buzzed meat was not flensed by seagulls, crows, or shore crabs; her bloated flesh didn’t harden into marbled pink-and-black sculpture under puckering slabs of skin. Nothing about the whale haunted our dreams.

No one mourned or wept. No one set cairns. No one crouched to peer into the gashes, no one poked at her with sticks, no one picked off pieces and pocketed them like saint’s fingers—no one gave a second thought to their own death as they didn’t run past her every day.

No one closed their eyes or knelt to pray at her tail. In fact, no one thought twice about this unwithering bone church of obliteration. No one held their breath whenever the tide came in.