Prose by Cailey Niandrea Pasco

Edited by Caleb Azu

The whale hasn’t eaten in almost three weeks when it comes across a splashing brown fish at the surface of the ocean. There’s a slight grumble in its stomach at the sight of easy food, but upon swimming closer, the whale realizes it’s never seen quite a strange fish. In fact, the fish doesn’t look like a fish at all. The whale swims right up to it, a fin away and right in the eyeline with what looks like a strange alien creature. It’s brown with a long tentacle on one end and along its body are short pink protrusions that are too skinny to be fins. The alien certainly can’t swim with those limb-things. It gasps for air, and without thinking the whale reaches closer and lifts its fin from below the alien, bringing it clean above the water. 

The alien coughs up water and shivers as its protrusions grasp very barely onto the whale’s limb. “Why, thank you.” 

The whale feels a series of pats from its fin all the way to its blowhole. The feeling is unwelcome and gross as the alien settles on a new part of the whale’s body. “What are you?” 

“What are you?” the whale replies. “Are you an alien?”

“I’m a mouse,” it says. “I come from a place above water.”

Ah, a land animal. That makes sense. The whale has been to the docks along the coast a few times. There, it saw humans and other animals tied to the humans’ hands—ones that had four protrusions like the mouse and used them to travel. The whale can’t imagine not having fins and a tail. How heavy those land animals must feel. This alien—mouse looks far smaller than those other land animals though. 

“If you belong on land, why are you out here in the water?” 

“I fell from that boat right over there, you see.” The mouse points its finger to a boat in the distance. The whale can’t see the mouse’s limb, but it searches around anyway, locking onto the quickly shrinking vessel at the horizon line. There is no way the whale would be able to bring the mouse back to its origin point. 

“How unfortunate.”

“Indeed,” the mouse says, “however, it is quite nice to have been able to meet a—and what are you?”

“I’m a whale.”

“A whale!” The mouse giggles. The whale can feel the mouse’s weight shifting on it’s back as it jumps up and down. “I’ve never seen a whale like you! Not in all my life on the boat! And your fins don’t even match.” 

This whale does not like this alien mouse. “Well, I’ve never seen an alien like you.” 

Without anywhere to go, the whale reluctantly accepts the task of swimming to the coast and bringing the mouse with it. The mouse had asked where the whale had been swimming to before it rescued it, and the whale said the coast for food. The whale supposed he could bring the mouse with him, but the trip still had a week left, and the whale didn’t know how this alien mouse would eat. But it offered anyway, and the mouse said yes. The whale later realizes after the mouse accepts his offer that it wasn’t so sure how to eat either with the mouse on its back. 

The whale starts swimming at its top speed. Not that its speed is very fast—not with its uneven fins. The mouse squeals at the speed and asks the whale if it can go faster, to which the whale snaps back no. Then the mouse asks how long it can hold its breath, to which the whale says it doesn’t know. Then, the mouse asks if it could go inside its blowhole. 

The whale begins to wish he could swim faster so that the mouse would fly off its back and stop its incessant probing. 

“Do you always ask so many questions?” grumbles the whale. 

“No. I’d never had a friend to ask them to before.”

A friend. It’s a lovely word the whale stores in the warmth of its belly. The whale has never had a friend before. But this land animal certainly will not be the first. 

The mouse’s curiosity only grew the more it saw absolute nothingness in the sea. Surely death must be more exciting than a line between a blue sky and even bluer water. Everything was so blue. Besides the mouse’s new friend. 

“So why are you white?”

The first night with company, the whale slows to something akin to autopilot as it sleeps. The mouse is laying on the whale’s back when it sees lightning. It isn’t a flash like the blinding light it’s used to witnessing on The Ayala. This lightning is unusual—fleeting, like the mouse knows all too well—but a streak in the night sky instead. Soft, quite lovely to the mouse’s eyes. 

The mouse jumps up, startling the whale with its pats on its back. 

“Lightning!” 

The whale grumbles awake. “What are you talking about? There’s no lightning.” 

“I saw it!”

“Did you hear the thunder afterward?”

“Well . . . no.” So the lightning isn’t lightning after all. “It wasn’t exactly like lightning. It was like a small streak of light in the sky.”

A sigh. “That wasn’t lightning. That was a star.”

“A star.” The mouse repeats, softly, slowly, like it’s savoring the word. It had never seen stars that move when it was on the boat. There were only a few it could see outside of the bright lights of the ship illuminating the sky. Now, the sky was filled with stars—thousands, millions of them—bright enough that the mouse could very well see the outline of the universe. And now the mouse has learned that they move, too. 

“We should make a wish,” the mouse declares. 

“That’s silly.” 

“Do it! These stars are falling—it disappears so quick it must be special! Make a wish, friend.”

“Fine. I wish for food. And for you to stop talking.” 

“That’s not a wish!”

“Yes it is. I said ‘I wish’.”

“Well then you should not waste your wish on something like that! I’ll be quiet if that means you’ll make a real wish.” The mouse quiets then, and all it can hear is the small splashes of the whale echoing for miles. In the peaceful silence the mouse wonders what its own wish would be. It’s already learned more in this one day than all its life on The Ayala. 

Then, “What I want cannot be granted by some silly star.” 

“Not if you don’t wish,” the mouse replies.

“No.” 

The mouse pauses its glee to look down at the whale. It slides over to where its fin rests on the surface of the water, and looks straight into its right eye. 

“Is it because you’re white?”

“White whales don’t exist.”

“But you’re a white whale.” 

The whale doesn’t answer, and the mouse knowingly turns away. The mouse had never seen a whale all alone in the ocean before. They usually traveled in groups, and this white whale the mouse has made friends with is all alone. 

After some time, the mouse stares at the sky and looks for another shooting star while the whale thinks in silence. The mouse wonders if two beings can wish on the same star. If not, the mouse would find another star. The whale can have this one. 

“I have many things I would wish for,” the whale says reluctantly.

“Like what?”

“Two proper fins. To be blue. A pod.” 

“A pod? Like other friends?” 

“I suppose. It doesn’t matter anyhow, because I’ve never had one.” 

“You don’t need a pod. You have me! At least for a little while.”

“You’re not a whale. A pod needs to have whales.” 

“But you’re a whale. Shouldn’t that be enough?” The whale is silent, and the mouse takes that as encouragement to continue. “Aaaaand, you don’t need to be blue! If you were blue, you wouldn’t be shiny like you are right now, under the stars! You glow in the dark because you’re white! Glowing is really cool. I wish I could glow,” the mouse says wistfully. “And I wish I could swim, like you. Then we could swim together, friend.” 

“That would be the day,” the whale would snort if it could. But it feels better by this invasive little alien mouse on its back. 

“Can I go into your blowhole now? Does it lead deep into your insides? Your stomach? Can I see?” 

“What? No!”

“Then can I touch your eye? I’d never touched anyone’s eye before. And yours are so large.” 

“I said—ow! Stop that!” 

“Oops, sorry!”

The whale feels the mouse start to prod its blowhole next, and the whale almost flips over so the mouse would get off of it. 

Another day passes, and the mouse continues to ask the whales questions about things the whale cannot possibly know and other things that cross the whale’s boundaries. The mouse’s constant questions annoy the whale, even after the night before. But that is the mouse’s intention. It wants to learn everything it can up until it’s very last thing. It wants to know what happens when you die.

The mouse has only been with the whale for a small amount of time, but the mouse already knows that it will never be able to see what the whale sees every day. Only animals who can swim get to see all the stars in the universe and make wishes on the falling ones. Certainly not the mouse. Not with its small lungs and small limbs. Nor its eyes, which were made for something other than the ocean, a place the mouse would never see at all. He couldn’t even dream of it. It’s hard to dream of what you’ve never had. Once upon a time, wishes and dreams were all the mouse needed. It had heard other mice—older mice, who’d lived longer than The Ayala had sailed—whisper stories of a place with green that grew from the soil like the fur on its back. Eventually the mouse realized all it has ever known is gray steel and blue water. So the mouse jumped. 

And now the mouse has a friend. Only for a little while, though. Their friendship will last as long as their bodies can fight the growing hunger. A terrible way to go—starvation. The mouse has been quite hungry in the past before, and it seems dreadful to allow its only friend to go that way, too. But the mouse wants to know as much as it can before that. So it asks the whale about the water and about the sky and about itself. 

“What’s at the bottom of the ocean?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never swam to the bottom,” the whale answers. 

“Aren’t you curious?”

“It’s too deep for me to swim.” 

“Have you even tried? Why won’t you try?”

“I would run out of air.”

“Why would you run out of air?”

The mouse continues on with its plethora of questions. Some the whale can answer, and some the whale cannot. As the hours of the day pass, most of the mouse’s questions cannot be heard over the loud rumbling of the whale’s stomach. The whale can’t hear it, but the mouse’s stomach rumbles, too. 

“I’m going to eat you if you do not stop asking me these questions,” the whale mutters.

The mouse’s ears perk up in hope. “You will? You’ll eat me?”

“Of course not.”

The mouse’s small body deflates. “Oh.” They’re traveling for another hour—in silence this time, save for the occasional splashes of the whale and their rumbling stomachs. 

Then the mouse asks again, “Why won’t you just eat me?”

The whale slows. 

“You are . . . a friend,” the whale says carefully, testing out the word. “I do not think friends eat each other.” 

“Yes, they do. If you were my friend you would eat me.”

The whale cannot see the mouse atop its head, but it looks up anyway, up to the blue sky. There’s nothing much to see whenever the whale looks above the water. The whale imagines the mouse’s face talking to it, like a real conversation. 

“I am starving. A friend would not tempt me to eat them while I am hungry.”

“You are hungry because you haven’t attempted to eat. Why?” 

The mouse knows. The whale knows, too. 

“I’m starving, too. I haven’t eaten in two days, and there is nothing for me to eat here in this ocean,” the mouse says. “A friend would swallow me whole instead of leaving me to die on its back under the bright sun. If you were to eat me, you would allow me to die in the warmth of my friend. And if you were to eat me, I would die helping you. We could help each other as friends do.”

The whale doesn’t respond right away, and for a moment the mouse asks if its large friend has fallen asleep. 

“But we would no longer be friends. If I were to eat you, I would have no one. No pod.”

The mouse doesn’t think of this. It’s a sad thought, leaving the whale all alone when the mouse had done so much to become its friend. The mouse wonders what the other mice had thought when they realized it was gone. Do they miss the mouse? Do they know the mouse isn’t aboard The Ayala anymore? 

The Ayala was not a cozy place. It wasn’t warm or comforting, and all the mice liked staying hidden near the boilers for the heat, but the mouse could never see anything in that stuffy, sweltering box. No open sea, no open sky. Certainly not a place one could spot grass. There was no life on The Ayala or among the mouse’s other larger, human neighbors that made it worth staying aboard. The open ocean was right there. How could the mouse not have jumped? The only place left to explore was death, and what was a more welcoming way to leap into the unknown than the ocean? Besides, the endless water is nicer than the underside of a rubber boot. 

Now the most welcoming place seems to be the inside of the whale. How warm it must be in there. The mouse is not fond of the idea of leaving the whale alone and without a pod again, but . . .

“In a few days time I will die from hunger anyway.” 

The whale doesn’t respond. Not for a little while until the mouse gathers its weaning strength to jump up and ask the whale why its tail splits in two when the mouse’s tail does not. 

The whale, of course, does not have an answer. 

The whale and the mouse continue on talking, and the whale continues to hum with the comfort of its friend’s weight on the whale’s body. The whale soon realizes it has not only become accustomed to the mouse’s tiny body, but also finds comfort in the feeling. 

But the mouse scared the whale when it wanted to be eaten. Scared it with its questions and its thoughts and the sincerity of it all. The thought of eating its friend makes the whale feel sick in the belly, fins slowing to ease the ache. But the mouse does not bring it up again. Not in the next following days, and it’s almost as if the conversation were never had at all. Then they encounter a bloom of jellyfish, coloring this blue in blue world in lovely pinks and oranges. The whale wonders what the mouse sees, from up above the water. From underneath the surface, the whale can see the dangerous tentacles, floating about menacingly. Atop the whale’s head, the mouse hops up with glee leaning as close as it possibly can into the water to get a good look at the beautiful clouds.  

Its jumping does no good for the mouse’s weakened balance, and it slips off in the blink of an eye. The whale hears a splash and then a small shriek of surprise from the mouse. The whale is floating far enough away from the jellyfish so that when the mouse falls it’s nowhere near the danger of those stinging vines, but the whale feels the shock of fear all the same. On instinct, the whale’s fin rises up from below the mouse before it can fall any further into the abyss below, and the mouse sputters and laughs as it gasps for air. 

“Are you alright?” The whale asks. 

“Yes! That was thrilling!” The mouse sounds delighted, but its eyes are wide and its tiny limbs tremble as it crawls back to the safety on the whale’s back, far from the water and warm under the sun. “Just—thrilling.”

The whale resists the urge to scold its friend. “Yes, well probably best for you to only observe from above the water. The jellyfish aren’t going to swim away from you. Quite the opposite.” 

The mouse squeaks as it lays on the whale. It’s small and unusual, not like the enthusiasm the mouse had shown only moments ago. But the whale is too busy trying to keep its own swim steady so as not to be teased by its friend to notice. On the whale’s back, the mouse shivers and stares up into the sky with widened, startled eyes. 

What is scary is that for a moment, the mouse was scared, too. Scared of drowning and sinking into the water with nowhere to go. For that one, drowning second, the ocean looked beautiful and expansive, like the mouse could sink and be forever embraced, but the fear of dying overwhelmed the beauty. Truly, the mouse is afraid of dying. It’s a terrifying, unfortunate development for the mouse—nothing like when it had first tried. The first jump off The Ayala was nothing but peaceful. 

The mouse has gone long enough without a reason to pursue living—it’s already dying of hunger—and yet just then, in the water, unable to swim or even thrash with its weak, starved limbs, had been so terrifying to the mouse until its friend had saved it. 

The mouse wonders what this means for its resolve—to be so close to death, and yet this unfamiliar fear of the world beyond its tiny body now scares it. The mouse supposes it’s never had the true opportunity to explore the world, being trapped on The Ayala. But the whale and everything they’ve seen together, everything its friend has shown it about the world seems much more than the little it once had to lose. The mouse does not know if this is enough. It is more than The Ayala has ever shown the mouse, but it does not know if it’s still enough. 

The whale is dreaming. Or half dreaming, because it’s still swimming. In the whale’s dream, it sees what it thinks may be its mother. The whale has no recollection of its mother, nor its pod. It had been abandoned when it was so little, and no pod would take the whale in because of its color and its small fin. How the whale has managed to live long enough with so little food, it doesn’t know, but it seems to find food just in time, every time. 

Now, in its dream, the mother is leading it, caressing the whale with her fin. The whale is quite happy to stay in this dream. Suddenly, it’s instead the mouse, swimming right along next to it, as a pod. They stumble upon another whale. This one isn’t quite like the other whales either, but it’s like the whale and the mouse. An outsider! The mouse and the whale and their new friend make their own pod of outsiders. It’s so nice, and then they’re diving deep, deep, deep into the water. The whale can’t exactly breathe, but it seems nice. They’re a family, and they’ll find more to join them. But they go further down, and the whale starts to feel unsure. It gestures to the others to come up, tries to speak to the mouse, but nothing comes out because it has no air. The whale struggles to breathe, and the ocean starts to grow dark. Darker and darker and darker—                                       

The whale’s eyes open, and it tries to suck in a breath, only to realize it cannot. It’s awake and truly cannot breathe. The only way it can breathe—its blowhole—seems to be blocked by something large, something moving. Maybe a fish?

The whale, beginning to panic, starts to call out to the mouse for help with no response. On instinct, the whale blows with all its might, trying to expel whatever may be lodged there. Water and the blockage fly out, and the whale here’s the spray and an unwelcome, shocking squeal. The mouse lands on the whale with a surprising thump. 

“You? Wh—” The whale cries out. “I could not breathe!”

“I’m sorry!” The mouse cries, too. “I did not know! I did not know you would not be able to breathe! I just wanted to see—I didn’t mean to—”

“What were you trying to do?” The whale asks. But the whale knows. The mouse knows, too. The mouse does cry then. Truly. The whale wants to cry, too, but it’s too shocked, too betrayed by the beautiful dream and by its friend. The whale’s first and only friend.

Two days passed in peace since the jellyfish scene. It was peaceful until now, but the whale kept wondering in that time—kept thinking about the mouse and its frightening intentions. Is this what it wished for when they’d seen that shooting star? 

“Why?”

The mouse sniffles. “What?” 

“Why!” The whale says, louder this time.

“I don’t know,” says the mouse.

“If you don’t know, then why? Why do you want to be eaten? Why would you ask me to eat you!”

The mouse sniffles and sniffles. The whale feels bad for yelling at the mouse, but it feels hurt, too. The whale wonders if this is what it means to finally have a friend. Is this truly what friends do? Eat each other?

“Why do you want me to eat you?” The whale asks again, gentler. “I thought you were my friend, too.” 

The mouse stops sniffling. It sounds passionate when it replies, “What do you mean? Of course I am!” 

“But I don’t think friends would do this,” the whale says. “You say that if I were your friend, I would eat you. But if you were my friend, you would sit on my back and continue to be my friend until we reach the coast.” 

The mouse feels guilty then. Guilt and shame. It eats at the mouse’s stomach like the hunger pains have been—eating away at its body and resolve. 

“When I was aboard the boat, the other, older mice used to tell me of the expanses of green grass that warmed when the sun was out and bloomed in a rainbow of colors after a cold rain. It was as if you mixed the sun with the color of a sea turtle shell. In all the time I spent searching for it along the docking bays, I’d never seen this field they talked about.” The mouse crawls over to the whale’s fin as it tells its story. It wants the whale to see the mouse as it speaks. “Maybe if I were a whale like you, I could swim across the ocean and find it for myself, but I cannot.” 

“That’s why we’re doing it together!”

“Yes,” the mouse smiles. “But I don’t want to like this. You and I are both starving, and I am nothing but useless in this body. It’s not made for the ocean, and you cannot eat with a mouse on your back.”

There is only one answer in the mouse’s mind. But it would leave the whale alone without a pod.

The whale disagrees. “I can! And I can teach you to swim! We’ll reach the coast, and no longer be starving. We could learn to swim together, and we’ll find others like us. We’ll have our own pod, like you said.” 

They’re so close to the coast. Only two days more. The whale can feel its hunger depleting its energy, and its smaller fin is straining and crying out in pain, but the whale can do it. The whale can do it if the mouse stays. 

“Be my friend,” the whale insists—pleads. “Be my friend until we both find your grass. It’s only a little while now before we reach the coastline.” 

Learn to swim. For a second the mouse thinks it could do it—for only a second, hope reignites inside the mouse. Hope is a warm feeling. It interrupts the growing cold inside of the mouse, and then the mouse thinks about how nice it would be to die warm. Warm inside the belly of its friend. The whale wouldn’t even notice. Maybe the mouse could crawl inside of its mouth while it slept. That would be nice.  

No. The mouse feels the shame from moments earlier, new again. The mouse cannot do that. Not to its friend. It looks over to the water below the whale. The abyss that’s taunted the mouse all its life.The great unknown the mouse had forgotten in the small time it’s become friends with the whale. The reason it had met the whale in the first place. 

The mouse could never learn to swim. It’s never even lived.

“Do you really believe I’ll survive long enough to make it there?” 

“Yes. I’ll make sure of it.” 

Hope is such a wonderful, warm feeling. Just as warm as its friend. Just as warm as the dying sun along the horizon and as warm as the surface of the water. It’s okay if the water grows colder the farther it goes. It will still be warm at first. 

“Alright, I will be your friend a little longer.”