Fiction: A Whale Like No Other

By

Suvojit Banerjee

Have you ever felt a shiver up your spine when you’re swimming barely some distance from the beach in a sparkling clear sea alone and something brushes up your legs? You pause for a while and let the surge of adrenaline run its course and look at the water.

There’s nothing there, nothing but corals and little colorful fishes playing hide and seek through them. You remember the tourist guide telling you this is one of the best places to let yourself surrender to the water and fulfill all your merman fantasies; and you remember underlining the ‘less human footfalls’ with your red marker and choosing your spot.

What might’ve that been? A big grouper? A turtle? A manatee? Aren’t dugongs and manatees extinct?

Then you notice something, some distance away, looking like a big inkblot in the clear frame of the sea, moving slowly towards you. Your heart pounds. Your heart tells you what it is, but your brain doesn’t want to believe.

You know what it is. You’ve seen those movies. You know how it ends.

Yet your brain screams: I wanna see it. I wanna see it.

The dorsal fin that you want to see never comes out of the water. Instead, the dark spot swirls like a serpent. It is barely a hundred feet from you. It emerges near the surface and you see it, in all flesh and bone, the mossy-black body of a primal hunter that the world has long forgotten.

Like a flash, you see a picture of something from ten years back.

“This is a Basilosaurus” the voice in that reverie says. For the first time you wish it had been a shark instead.

Suvojit Banerjee

Suvojit Banerjee has seen twenty seven summers, but he doesn’t remember all of them; his existence is torn between the suburbs in West Bengal he grew up in, and the city called Atlanta he now lives in. The world around him adorns many masks, and so does he, while roaming around its streets with the eyes as a journal and his soul as a pen. He is searching for answers in this surreal yet slimy maze, but the questions keep on changing every time.

His poems and prose have been previously published in Silver Birch Press, and also featured in places like eFiction India, The Camel Saloon, The Word Couch, HackWriters, Voices de la Luna, and The Stray Branch Literary Magazine. His poems have also been featured in the book ‘A Significant Anthology’, which covers 175 writers from all over the globe.

He observes, sometimes giving up consciousness in return. It is a dangerous thing, this silent stalking of nostalgia, but he has a maddening urge. He has to follow the trail.