THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD 

The whale washes up onto shore every week. Most everybody has given up on the ritual of its rescue. If it’s not the heat that gets it, it’s the weight of its own damn self that suffocates it. That’s how crucifixion kills you, too. Not supposed to hold your arms up like that for so long. All of the rest of you starts shoving in on your lungs until you just can’t find it in yourself to breathe. But it takes a long time. They say people used to beg the Roman soldiers standing at their feet just to get it over with. 

If only the whale would die in the ocean—then it could be something, mean something, support an ecosystem of teeming life, be something other than several tons of blubber and guts and stink. 

Instead, we have to get rid of it. Great, hulking body. Big great stink. It ruins the view, tourists say. Nobody wants to look at the shoreline when there’s a stranded carcass leaking into the sand. Not good for the kids. 

On the twelfth week, the whale burst wide open and doused cars, people, and sand with its own organs and tissue. I respect that. I can only hope to be so inconvenient in death. We stopped leaving it to rot after that. 

We’ve tried a few things. We used to cut it up with great big saws. We tried to eat it before we knew it would make us sick. 

Researchers would come in, learn about the whale’s diet, walk around it in circles in their violently orange spun-bonded polyethylene suits and hem and haw. Seems they eventually ran out of new things to learn about that big body. I think the smell started to get to them. 

THE WORD 

I get off work most nights around midnight. Tonight, I don’t get out of the hot, damp air of the kitchen until about one. It’s a tourist joint. Not getting a lot of business lately, but our clam chowder comes in bread bowls. People like it. 

My hands are raw and tender, all the fat and skin and oils turning soapy with the bleach I scrubbed with. There’s trash waiting for me outside the door; nobody wanted to walk the extra twenty feet to the dumpster. More smell for me. 

Mercy slips out of the back door when she hears the heavy dumpster lid come down over the last bag of trash. She likes this little ritual—coming outside when the job is done, fretting over my sore back, chastising me for doing it all on my own. 

“You should have told me you were taking out the trash.” 

I wipe my hands on my jeans. “You should have followed me outside.” 

“Bathroom,” she shrugs. “You got a cig?” 

This is our ritual, too. The walk to the parking lot that overlooks the municipal beach, splitting three or four Reds between us, because three shared cigarettes isn’t so bad as one swallowed all on your own. 

The sand makes the night strange, makes it vivid, bright. The shitty parking lights reflect in a ring around the top of Mercy’s head where the pale blonde of her roots are slowly overtaking cheap black dye. The whale is a big black sack in the sand below us. 

We lean against Mercy’s car—2003 Toyota Camry, big dent in one side from what Mercy refers to as a mild misunderstanding. 

She crosses her feet, brushes her hair away from her face with chapped, red hands. “You think they’ll drag it back into the water this time?”

I am thinking about her fair eyelashes, the bolt of her jaw, the irritated rough skin of her knuckles. I’m thinking about the perpetual stain of black dye on her earlobe and how her throat bobs when she laughs. I am very tired of thinking about that fucking whale.

“Maybe,” I say, because none of it matters, actually. The whale will be gone tomorrow. The whale will be back on Monday. I will keep smelling it through my smokes. 

“I think it’s a test,” Mercy says. She swipes at her nose where crystalline mucus is collecting from the cold. It smears over the cuff of her sleeve. “We just need to find the right way to dispose of it, so it can be done.” 

“What is the right way?” 

She cheerfully ignores my question and passes me the cigarette. It’s wet from her mouth. “Or maybe it wants something else. We have to give it what it wants.” 

“You sound like the Jesus freaks,” I say. There’s been a rumble of distress in our little beach town. The older folks that go to church on Sundays have been warning the rest of us, voices in the wilderness, that there’s someone to punish. Someone is running from God. Someone is bringing the whale to our little bay. An omen, a portent. Me, personally—I think God is just a little bored. 

“Well, I was an altar boy.” Mercy looks out at the water, clears her throat. “Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. You’d better watch out.”

I consider her. “Funny. You still believe in that stuff?” 

“Less about believing and more about other people believing. Doesn’t matter if I think the world is ending when everyone else knows it will. Doesn’t matter if I think I’m going to hell when the world has already decided where I’m going.” 

A group of teenagers crosses the beach, stumbling drunk, arm-in-arm, whooping and cheering as they make their way to the whale. They slap their hands against tough blubber, carve their initials into the belly with pocketknives, give each other hand-laced boosts up to sit on it and take pictures. There’s so much laughter. They’ve made their peace with it. 

I let the cigarette fall, grind it under my heel. “I don’t want you to go to hell, Mercy.” 

Mercy laughs, low and hoarse. “Don’t be so bleak, baby. I’m not going anywhere but home. Look, you walked me to my car and everything.” 

“That I did.” I push myself off the hood of her car and halfheartedly kick at her front tire. “You check the pressure on these, lately?” 

Her eyes crinkle. She likes me. I love her very badly. “You can check tomorrow.” 

“Deal.” 

She comes to stand in front of me, tucks her cold fingers just under the collar of my shirt. Leans in, kisses my cheek, chaste and dry. “Goodnight, Jonah.” 

THE BELLY OF THE FISH 

In the dream, she’s in my lap. There’s a hole in my throat, and she’s kind enough to put her hand over it to let me breathe. 

Easy, she says.

Mercy, I cry. Mercy. 

She’s in my lap, and she’s so hungry I can feel it in the air. There’s a hole in my throat. There’s a hole in hers. I don’t cover it. I dig my fingers in, curl them, shove them through, work them in to the knuckles. I can feel the ribbing of her windpipe. 

Go on, she says. I’m starving. 

My knuckles slip past the opening. Four fingers now, bloodless, shining. She’s getting blue in the face. The hole is the size of my hand. The hole is the same size as me. The hole is the stomach of everything. She takes my wrist and wrenches me deeper, down into something dark, thumb tucked into fist, my arm bulging in her throat. Her gaze stays steady, blue like the shell of a crab. 

I can swallow you, she promises. 

Mercy. 

Her palm is clammy where it’s clasped over my throat. She won’t let me suffocate. She won’t let me. I can open my entire hand inside her chest. Inside, it’s all slippery. Her heart is dense and furious, throbbing at me when I close my fingers around it. 

Take me already, she whines. Her teeth are wet and shiny. There’s spit gathering at the edges of her mouth, tacky and gray. Take it. 

I take her heart and pull it out to sea. 

LORD, DO NOT HOLD US ACCOUNTABLE

Mercy doesn’t come to work the next day. The whale is gone, and so is Mercy. I’ve never seen her miss a shift, never seen her sick, never seen her later than five minutes early. She’s just one of those people. When she doesn’t show, something in the world has been misplaced. 

And when girls like her don’t show up when they’re expected to, there’s blood in the water. 

Nobody else seems too concerned when I ask around. The boys from the kitchen never liked her much. Never liked me too much either, but she always took the brunt of it. 

When I go looking outside, her car is in the parking lot. I watched her drive away last night before I walked home, but her car is in the parking lot. 

I walk back to the kitchen with my hands in fists. There’s one guy, you see. Marcus. Douchebag line cook who always gives Mercy shit. If she’s gone, if someone hurt her—

He’s leaning against the wall by the employee exit, scrolling on his phone and picking something out of his ear. 

I shove him up against the brick. “The fuck did you do to her?” 

“Jesus,” he bites, seizing my wrists. “Are you crazy?” 

“Mercy’s gone.” 

“Fucker was here yesterday.” Marcus pries me off him, swipes his hand over his greasy apron. “I didn’t do shit to him, alright? He’s probably off somewhere, getting it up his—” 

I’m not much of a fighter, really, but a punch to the nose is a punch to the nose. Marcus’s head snaps back, pops off the brick in a striking ricochet. His hands come up over his face, but I’m not finished. There’s a loose animal in my limbs, cornered and certain. His skin is ready and warm under my hands, easily split, easily bruised. So’s mine, turns out. It goes tender under his fist. He gets a hand around my throat and squeezes. Lets me reach for him and strain against his grip with a bloody smile splashed over his face. 

“You think I did something to your boyfriend? I got news for you. There’s a lot of people that would do something to him if they got the chance.”

He throws me to the ground. Gets a foot on my stomach. 

The first time I hung out with Mercy outside of work, she let me into her apartment and said, we aren’t going to fuck, and I said okay, and we played cards at her kitchen table. She’d painted it herself. She was stupid proud of it. It was yellow like old teeth, but she called the paint October Moon. 

The sun looks yellow, now, behind Marcus’s head. His face is ruddy when he leans over me, spitting mad. He presses down slow on my stomach and lets my insides shift around the sole of his boot. Make way. 

“Do me a favor.” He scrubs over his face with the back of his hand, spreading the blood from his nose in a childlike smear, a fingerpainting. “When you find his body in whatever ditch he threw himself in, throw yourself in there, too.” 

A SHIP GOING TO TARSHISH 

In the dream, she’s in the water. Naked and trembling, shoulders squared and spine straight. The whale is a mountain on the horizon, hulking and hungry. 

Mercy, I call. 

She wades deeper into the water. It sucks at her thighs in whirling riptides. Greedy for her, troubled and nursing like a child. 

There’s the whale song. Slow and baying. Death march beauty. The whistling, the begging, the sweeping music of it comes to me with the wind that whips through her hair. She’s a saint in the moonlight. She is unafraid. 

There’s the people song. Behind me. Death march fury. They want her gone. They’re tired of that body. They’re tired of the song. They’re tired of the smell. Cut her into pieces, bury her, eat her in sickening bites, pack C-4 into her stomach and run for cover. Come to her like the sick and the dying, watch her dry out in the sand. 

Come out of the water, Mercy. 

She’s up to her shoulders now, her head a dark mass. Ring of light around the crown. I could be the sand under her nails. I could be the salt on her skin. But her head slips under the water, and she has never been further from me. 

SHIPMASTER

The whale gets puked back up on Monday. Mercy has been gone for three days, three nights. 

I go down to the beach. I carry an axe. 

The usual crowd has arrived. Nobody pays much attention to me, even with my hand around this long handle. We’ve all taken ourselves out on this whale in one way or another. It’s made a strangeness of all of us. Photographers, artists, clusters of middle-schoolers holding their hands over their noses and shoving at each other. 

And, of course, the faithful. 

Dressed simply, feet bare, pants rolled up above their ankles. Hand in hand. The prophet is in the front, reading from his great big book. His voice is like a father’s. He speaks in that special way that preachers speak—that steady cadence that makes people close their eyes and hum.

He says, “And Jonah said unto them, take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you: for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you.” 

The raging sea goes calm. I drop my axe, sit in the sand, collect it in my hands. Listen to the sermon. 

I wait for the dark. I watch the people while they circle around, people who came from all over to lay their hands on our whale. There is something sweet about fear, how it makes masses reverent. We worship what we don’t understand. 

MINE AFFLICTION

It takes hours before I’m alone with the whale. It died somewhere around noon. There were prayers, and photos, a few slow claps. A fucking clown show, is what it is. 

I take up my axe and approach her. She’s heavy in the sand, a sinkhole. A stomach in everything. She’s hungry enough to feel it in the air. 

I will give her another mouth. 

The first strike leaves the blubber wet. It’s more sucking than carving, like the stomach needs the axe. The lamb needs the slaughter, the sinner needs the priest, and I need Mercy. 

A long slit along the side, and a tangle of flesh slips out on an exhale. Relieve the pressure. Before the whale, I thought of ocean things as bloodless. The whale reminds me that she is a mammal. She soaks me, hot and splashing, shamelessly wet. 

There is sound when a stomach opens—hissing and sighing. It creaks and groans like a house. 

It’s warm in there. I could reach for her, pull her out, let her gasp out saltwater into the sand, but there’s a womb for both of us if I can get this mouth to open wide enough. 

Insides are a mess of dangly bits—it’s good to remind yourself of that. You might only come up to your father’s shoulder, but the insides of you can stretch out for thirty feet. Your reach is farther than you know. 

I drop the axe and pull out intestines in heaving armfuls. My hands fumble over gray flesh and senseless warmth. The smell is enough to make me choke. It’s the smell of hundreds of corpses, all of us, tossed limply and easily over each other and left to sleep in our nakedness. I can’t get over the warmth—how good it feels, how long it’s been since I’ve been touched like this. The beach gets cold at night. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve ever been touched. 

It’s slippery inside. Wet like wanting someone. Like wanting someone badly. Both arms go in first, and I grab something and pull. Haul myself in, one panting slide at a time. 

There’s a sculpture in Florence, Italy. My parents took me there when I was young and let me into a quiet chapel. Everything goes quiet in a chapel. As soon as you step inside the doorway, all the sounds of the street, the honking, the shuffling feet, the rumbling motors, it all settles at the front steps. The quiet makes you want to believe in something. Probably, the marble is just thick, the door is just heavy. The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, she’s called. Some holy woman who’d never gotten her rocks off before and finally put her fingers inside herself for the first time. It was an angel, she said, with a flaming spear. He pierced her heart, tucked his spear into the tough muscles and woke her to the divine. 

This is the flaming spear, and the fingers, and the open mouth she tucked herself into. This is God, all of it, shoving myself into warmth and slickness and wetness, this is the angel, this is the light coming down from the heavens, this is the carved marble of her face cut open in sweet shock. 

The whale sucks me in, every last bit of me, and my hand closes around a fine-boned wrist. 

MAN AND BEAST

When I wake up, I’m in the sand. So heavy in the sand I’m sinking into it. I open my eyes, but one is pressed into the gritty earth and the other can see only sky, great stretches of it. I’m so heavy. My great big body is useless and hulking, a shape in the distance, a stain in the cloth. 

You’ve never seen lungs like mine. I can dive deeper than you. Deeper than anyone. I can collapse in on myself and keep the entire ocean from crushing me. But the entire ocean is not as heavy as my big body. I cannot breathe around myself. I cannot lift my head. 

Mercy, I call. But beached whales cannot sing. 

Mercy, Mercy. 

The usual crowd gathers around me. A young couple carves their names into my side. J & M. Someone prays over me, asks God to take me back home. 

Enough of your punishment, Lord. Take your sacrifice and take it home. 

Shutters clicking, tourists and hopeful artists. I think of every drawing of Jesus on His cross. We love the agony of it, the beseeching eyes, we love that He asked for our forgiveness. Absolve us, absolve us. 

They are watching me die. They are letting me suffocate. They are smelling my body, and they have given up on the ritual of my rescue. 

WHEN MY SOUL FAINTED WITHIN ME I REMEMBERED THE LORD: AND MY PRAYER CAME IN UNTO THEE, INTO THINE HOLY TEMPLE