Sickly white flesh clung to the bones of a seafaring young boy who had no destination. He sat in a wooden dinghy which pushed and heaved through thick winter morning fog as gentle waves quietly protested against the sullen hull. The oars dipped halfway into the sea before a hefty grunt pushed through the surface and circled around and back into the sea. The crash of the sea against the rocky coastal land was typically so deafening that the sound of the boat was muffled into the waters, but this morning was blindingly quiet. Each dip of the oar that pushed away from the land sounded like a small rock being tossed into the sea over and over again. 

Facing the shrinking land sat the boy. His arms were toned from years of rowing through the violent coast in search of something he knows he’ll never find. When he first began looking for his answers to his unanswerable questions, his hair curled like a spring coil in the salty air, though after years battling the waves his hair became rough and almost eternally dry. His cheeks were thin and his once bright eyes sank into his skull like a fault line ran across his face, deep pits dug under them like this fault line collided along another. His head rang with the aftershocks of this cranial tectonic collision. 

On the last sliver of land the boy saw before descending into the icy bite of the fog was the town he grew up in. A perimeter of homes, his home, all sat along the edge of a sharp rocky slope that dipped into the white capped crash of the sea. Homes and businesses lined the edge into a town until the slope jetted off into a sharp outcrop where a lighthouse sat. No illumination peered from its lantern. Built to be a beacon for weary sailors, now just another faded glimmer that died with the town and its people. As the dinghy rowed into the sea, the boy watched the shrinking land become shrouded by the biting cloud of the fog, hiding him from one world, and isolating him into another. The last thing he saw before falling into the arms of the fog was the peak of the lighthouse. The boy watched it as it became slowly consumed, hoping to see anyone working to fix that lantern to beckon hope, but as the last inch disappeared behind the hold of the fog, the boy’s hope died just as the lanterns had, and he rowed on. 

The boy reached the edge of the fog and pushed through it. From the outside, it was a massive wall that reached the sky and built across the Earth, an apparition attempting to keep something out, or in. The boy pictured it as the ghost of what was once there. Maybe this is where the land stood millions or billions of years ago, maybe this was the world reminding him that no matter how long he looks and begs, everything will surpass him in time. 

A wind suddenly kicked up from inside the fog and lurched the dinghy further away. It wanted him gone, the boy knew that, so he stuck the ends of the oars into the sea and rowed and rowed until the fog that covered the land was nothing but a small brush stroke dotted on the horizon. 

The boy’s arm muscles shook as he pulled the oars into the dinghy with him. His forehead dripped a small cold sweat that mixed with the frigid sea air, his woolen glove wiped across his forehead and he shuddered out an exhale, able to see his breath in the cold air. Just in arms reach was an anchored buoy with a small flag erecting from the tip of it. The buoy was more of an oversized fishing bobber, given its circular size around its red and white coloring. The large bobber rolled with the small waves of the sea as the boy reached his hands out to steady himself against it as he tied a rope between it and his dinghy. The boy spun the bobber around until he saw a small latch with a padlock looped around the open knob. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a key and unlocked the latch. The inside echoed with the small waves that battered it incessantly, empty except for a notebook and a photo closed in a ziplock bag. He always thought it looked like a cozy place to live as a crab, safe from any seabirds. Or whatever else was out here. He pulled out the bag and the boy sat down in the boat. The latch of the buoy knocked against its hollow interior with a light echo.

He crinkled the plastic ziplock bag open and felt the notebook and photo with his damp, wrinkled hands. The dryness of the leatherbound covers against his hands made him grimace. The feeling was like nails against cardboard for him. He put the notebook back in the bag and grabbed the photo instead. It was a photo from his dads wallet. The two of them heading out on a fishing trip together, taken by his mom. They were standing in front of his dads pickup, the two of them in matching outfits of tan vests with infinite pockets for lures and hooks and a tan bucket hat. The dads arm was around the boy’s shoulders and they had smiles on that showed they were truly happy to be together. That happiness seemed so distant for the boy. He felt anger well up in the back of his head, but he mistook it for sadness and shook it away. He put down the photo into the bag and stuck it under his foot to avoid the wind. He took the notebook in his hands and bared his teeth as he forced himself to feel the binding of his dads writings. 

He thought of the note his father had left for him the day the sea digested him in its foamy blue stomach acid. That was a number of years ago. The passage of his time was at a point where he chose to stop keeping track of when he was.   

He thought of how stood outside his dads bedroom office. 

A freezing salty chill immediately stormed his body as he stepped past the door frame. The monumentous sound of waves battering the cliff shelf rang the room like the hollow bang of a large drum. 

The room was empty of life except for the remnants of the one his father used to lead. Bookshelves made of thick, polished wood lined high and wide along the wall he faced from the door frame. There were five shelves, each with enough headspace to stack books horizontally, which his father always detested, but ended up needing as his collection grew. There were four bookshelves in total, two on the left side of the wall, a space in the middle where a long mahogany desk sat cluttered with loose papers, books, a lamp, and then two more bookshelves on the right side of the wall. There was such little room between this last bookshelf and the wall that he couldn’t imagine even dust reaching in there. 

On the center of the wall the last bookshelf suffocated against was a perfectly round hole that looked out over the cliff’s edge and into the ocean. It was a window his father had left open. The boy stepped towards it, his white cotton socks shuffled against the floor and gathered dust like The Blob sucked up puny humans.

 The ocean grew from the sides as the boy reached the window. He stared out and watched the unnervingly calm sea ahead of him for some time he couldn’t recall. He wondered if his father was still out there, if he searched still for what he promised himself. 

He reached his arm out into the open air and was stung with a cold sting along his forearm so quick he yanked the window closed and let the hinges slam against the wall. The boom of the waves cut off in an instant, and the world was cut off. The room sat in a stillness so sudden, so quiet and shockingly peaceful that he pictured himself out on the sea with his father.

He shuffled his right foot backwards, the sound of his sock against the wood floor swept lightly as he turned towards the desk between the bookshelves. He stepped around the desk and faced the books, papers, and maps that stung his father with a venom that faltered them all to a long madness. Each covered in the blurry images and renderings of creatures that had once alluded them both. One was an inaccurate rendition of a big, hairy man beast. The image showed it as seven feet tall, but knelt in a flowery meadow with its soft hand held out in a weak fist towards a white spotted fawn’s curious snout. The boy scoffed at the image. His father had chosen this thing to be the boy’s first venture of discovery. He had always begged his father to take him on his adventures for those never known and rarely seen, but he always replied with him being too young, that he wouldn’t understand. His taste for discovery erupted into something more than desire. He yelled and pleaded and begged his father to take him. 

What happened on the trip helped kill his desire for adventure and discovery for an unforeseen future. If that was his fathers goal, he thought, he won. 

To the other side of this was what became of his father, of what had surrounded him, both of them, an all encompassing and neurotic image of what a man could become. The boy had originally sighted it when there were still other people around. He had gone out onto the sea to spot for whales, as the Grays were passing on their migration north. 

He had loved whales desperately since he was young. They were such massive creatures with a quiet touch. In spite of their size, they cared for where they stepped. Rarely one will come up to his dinghy to investigate him. They stick their long, gray snout out of the water and tilt to one side. When you look into their eye you can see the stars, you can see life glistened within them. You see that they love and mourn just like we do, but unlike us, they understand who they are. 

Early one morning the boy had overheard a murmur of a sighting of a Gray whale mother and calf coming up the coast, so the boy ever so emphatically rowed himself out to sea to see for himself. He rowed out of the horseshoe shaped bay and out to sea and wandered like a sightless deep sea fish and his head on a constant three-sixty swivel. His heavy binoculars pressed against his face for so long that red rings formed around his eyes. A few hours had passed and the sea had calmed around him, all he could hear were gentle waves kissing the hull of the dinghy. There was a certain peace to being so alone out here. The boy knew that he was at the mercy of the world that thrived below him, but he felt himself closer to life out here.

Just as the sun was close to lying itself to sleep under the golden covers of the western sea,  a wet spout killed the silence of the lulling waters. The boy was showered with the warm and sticky mist from the gray whale calf that had surfaced to spout at the edge of his small boat. The boy leaned over on his knees and watched the whale float parallel to him. Still just a calf but more than twice the length of his boat. Its snout bobbed halfway through the surface of the water before it turned on its side and peered an eye directly into the boys. Its inner pupil was dark with a faded mysticism, a light blue ring encircled the inner black. The orange glow of the setting sun reflected infinite stars behind this living eye. They looked into one another, but something was wrong. There was no spout of the mother. He squinted his brow and looked around for any sign of her, but the sea rested flat as a pane of black glass. A light slap on the water caught his attention back to the calf, it had wanted him back like a toddler would cry for their mom. He kneeled back down and leaned his body over the side of his boat and felt an empathetic sadness shared between them. He reached his right arm and clawed his hand to invite the whale into touch. As his hand grew closer, the whale gently moved its head into his hand. He lingered on its bumpy, barnacle scarred skin and felt its solitude. 

This moment lasted for no longer than their time would allow, as a teardrop of blood dripped from the bottom corner of its eye and rolled slowly down before evaporating into a fading cloud that dissipated red. He watched the blood blot into the water with eyes wider than the calf. He stood up and pulled his hand from the bleeding skin. A loud FWOOSH came from the right and he saw the obsidian black dorsal fin of an orca pierce the surface of the sea a few hundred meters away. Even from this distance, it showed itself to be massive. He had to tilt his head up to see the tip that dripped with the sea. The body rushed like a floating island caught in a riptide before submerging again. 

The gray whale calf hit its head against the water in a panic and turned its eye towards the boy. It rubbed its snout against the hull of his boat and the boy stumbled to his knees. He saw the eye of the whale grow in fear, and, just before the world went black with the orca’s darkness, he read that in its final moments, it wanted to be held by its mother. 

He felt the sting of regret that he ever told his father of this monstrous orca. His desire to discover like his father had struck them both deep into the cavernous mouth of this sea. Now he sat by the buoy his father had anchored out for him far into the sea and thought how once they’re anchored to the bottom of, they’re frozen for as long as time permits. 

As he exhaled into the incoming breeze, the familiar FWOOSH of the breaking sea pierced the silent air. The mile high obsidian fin began to slice through the sea around the boy as it began to circle him. He watched it enclose him in waves with a slow devotion to him. His bag jostled at his feet with the waves and he was reminded what he came here to do. The bag was heavy with the books and photographs from his fathers office, and he needed two hands to lift it up onto the seat. 

The thing began circling closer.

The uneasiness of the waves knocked his feet around but he kept his balance, as badly as he wanted to just fall into the sea and be consumed by whatever chased around him. Using all of the strength he built in his arms, he hoisted the backpack to his chest and stumbled forward as he shoved it into the buoy’s open latch. 

It circled closer. He could feel the drops of deflected seawater rain onto him. 

The buoy rocked with the sudden weight of his father, it almost appeared to sink for a moment. He stood back and watched the thing inch closer and closer. The bag of his fathers notebook and photo still slid along the floorboards of his boat, and he knelt towards it. Feeling both items, he unzipped the bag and took out the photo of the two of them. He saw the smiles on both of their faces and folded it into his pocket. He tossed the notebook back into the buoy and locked the latch shut. With the click of the padlock latch, the dorsal fin began to shrink below the waves with the slowness of a rising tide. When the sea became still once more, he untied his boat and began to row himself back towards land. Facing the buoy as he rowed away, he watched it shrink on the horizon. 

As the fog began to shroud him once more, he felt guided by the faint glimmer of the lighthouse on the ledge of town and rowed on.