After years of trying to keep a home in oceans filled with noise and plastic, the whales launched themselves into the sky, breaching our thinning atmosphere. Those of us who lived on the coasts watched them go, our hands clamped tight and hot over our mouths. We stood on the beaches, gazing upward for so long our necks ached. But only the moon looked back. Sometimes at night when I float on the silent, empty sea, I imagine them making a new life up there. Their baleen chock full of stardust. Singing their hearts out. Without us.
Arah McManamna (she/her) writes and lives in the creeping damp of the Pacific Northwest. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Hobart, Rejection Letters, Gravel Magazine, Outside In, and Cactus Heart Press.