[Matt Q]

Whale Song

The man turns out to be a whale. He’s kept it secret all these years, gives it away one night when he’s drunk. He’s walking home in the rain and he’s alone, or he thinks he is, and the street lights are making shapes in the puddles like moonlight rippling on the surface of the sea, and he starts to sing. He sings of primitive wolf-things that live in packs at the ocean’s edge and hunt fish in the shallows and come to spend ever more time in the water and swim further and further out until their hind legs fuse into tails and their paws become flippers and they are lost to the land and can never go home. His song has no words, just notes that glide and rise and dip and have an ache to them because he himself can never go back, or he thinks he can’t as he walks on the land in his land-mammal disguise, in his business suit and his leather shoes and his tie too tight around his neck, kicking through the puddles on the pavement and remembering the vastness of the ocean. But he’s not alone on the street, and someone films him on their phone and uploads it to the internet, and soon the whole town sees it and knows. His wife leaves him and takes the kids. He loses his job and he loses his home. He walks away from it all, leaves town, jumps a train to the coast hoping for solace in the sound of the waves, but the nearness of the sea just makes him feel worse. One night he walks to the end of the pier and strikes up his song and lets the wind carry it out into the darkness, and when the waves bring back only silence, he steps off the edge into the water. He swims away from the land, prays for his legs to fuse back.


2nd sentence: inserted "primitive" before "wolf-things".

Last sentence: "He swims out into the darkness" -> "He swims away from the land"