A Note on Sex and Death on the Beach

by Kelly Gray

Winner, Neutrino Short-Short Prize, selected by jj peña

When we find the porpoise, I have so much to tell you. How animals are queer. How for me, sex is everything. And how the details, like whales dying with genitals extending into the great blue sea, will be of use to you in the future. My scientist, my party-goer. I hear now that kids aren’t having sex. I get it, the apocalypse is slower than expected, dull even. Still, on the last day of the year we meander the mating grounds for harbor seals and sea birds, a place that life thrashes. We are a part of it. Then, out in the open, a body. The head and tail intact, the skin the texture of wet rubber, the midsection red and bright. The color of inside; pink meat, only a gleam of ribcage flashing white in the sun. There are no flies, no smell. We pry its mouth open with a piece of driftwood. There is a tongue, soft rows of perfectly neat teeth. Half the skull is visible, bulbous. We circle and circle. It is the last day of December, the sun is setting, we are alone on the beach with the smallest cetacean at our feet. I want this creature to tell you everything that I can’t; how one day I will be dead, and I hope that you have lived a joyous life of thrashing.

Kelly Gray (she/her/hers) is the author of Instructions for an Animal Body (Moon Tide Press 2021), My Fingers are Whales and Other Stories of Cetology (Moon Child Press 2021), and Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife (Quarterly Press 2022). She has contributed poetry and story to Northwest Review, Pithead Chapel, Harbor Review, Driftwood Press, BULL, Superstition Review, and elsewhere, and is thrilled to be a Best of the Net finalist and nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Some of her favorite things are backroads, donuts and smelling wet. You can read more of her work at writekgray.com or follow her @_west_of_west.