Tethered

by Erika Eckart

On the news, the aerial panning shot of the beach coated with whale bodies reads like an ancient inscription, the scattered hatch marks of their remains letters in a forgotten language, tea leaves telling us something. The reporter describes the smell: overwhelming, a million rancid fish markets, thousands of pounds of bodies about to explode with rot if someone doesn’t do something soon. No one knows why seemingly healthy whales beach themselves. It might be navy sonar or some quirk in the shape of the ocean floor that makes them do it, sure, but there is a theory that they are so tightly bonded when faced with loss they commit mass suicide. This is predicated on other shows of attachment: sometimes adult males follow their mothers in death for no reason but heartbreak, and when a captive whale had her baby taken away, she rammed herself against the side of the tank, cried out with vocalizations no human had ever heard, long distance wails at lower frequencies, the kind that travel farther in the deep ocean—having never lived in the wild, never having heard these sounds, somehow she found them, in the rubbery gray folds of her brain, the clicks and screeches that would locate the lost little one if only there were sea between them instead of sky. So maybe, scientists think, when one is sick and in resignation dawdles in the short water where you can feel and see the sun, they all follow. Maybe they’re confused, maybe begging the ill member to return with them to the deep sea, but maybe they know their mother/daughter/cousin is done for and they’ve decided they can’t go on, that life after is too dim. That to wade into the shallows and let the tide take them away is better than a lifetime of calling out to their missing member and receiving only silence in return. Maybe that’s the message the beached bodies leave us: a tether works two ways.

Erika Eckart is the author of the tyranny of heirlooms, a chapbook of interconnected prose poems (Sundress Publications 2018). Her writing has appeared in Double Room, Agni, Quarter After Eight, Quick Fiction, Nano Fiction and Quiditty, and elsewhere. She is a High School English Teacher in Oak Park, Illinois, where she lives with her husband and two children.