Soundings

The water was cool as I dipped my hand in, an icy contrast to the bright, warm sunlight beating down on us. The rhythmic rocking and quiet splish, splash of the water against the hull of the boat were the only noises out here in the middle of nowhere. We continued fishing, the familiar scent of salt and seaweed lingering in the breeze as we cast. My shipmate never talked much. I didn't mind. The quiet had always been more kind to me than words that stretched on and on without end.

By midday we'd barely caught enough to fill the bottom of the bucket. Not unusual. Some days the fish simply weren't interested.

A ripple had spread across the otherwise still water, though there wasn't a breath of wind to claim it. It passed beneath the boat and was gone almost as quickly as it had come.

Neither of us paid it much attention.

Around an hour later the water stirred once more, bigger this time. It rocked the boat hard enough to force us both to steady ourselves, sending little waves slapping against the hull. We exchanged a worried glance before I leaned over the side. A dark shape moved somewhere beneath us, so deep the water swallowed its edges. I watched it, trying to make sense of it, but the longer I looked, the less certain I became of where it began or ended. Before I could decide, it slipped back into the blue.

"Whale?" I asked, though I wasn't sure whether I meant to convince him or myself.

My shipmate didn't answer. He was staring toward the horizon, his face drained of what little color the sun hadn't already stolen. I followed his gaze and, for a moment, I couldn't understand what I was seeing.

The sea looked wrong.

Far out where the sky met the water, the surface had begun to rise. Not with the sharp crest of a wave or the rolling swell of a distant storm, but slowly, steadily, as though something beneath it was lifting the ocean on its back. White water burst outward in every direction. The swell reached us long before its source ever did, rocking our little fishing boat with impossible ease.

Then it surfaced.

It did not erupt from the sea. It rose.

One dark coil at a time, the ocean pouring from scales too distant to make out and too immense to comprehend. I waited for it to stop. It never seemed to. Each length of its body climbed higher than the last until I found myself wondering if I had mistaken it for a mountain somehow hidden beneath the waves.

By the time its head emerged, it looked as though it might brush the clouds themselves. Perhaps that was fear speaking. Perhaps memory has made it taller with each passing year. But I know this much: it was farther away than any ship I had ever seen, and still it dwarfed the horizon.

Most who've heard this tale have smiled politely before changing the subject. So call me a liar if it pleases you. I would have called myself one too, had I not watched the sea rise around it with my own eyes.

I remember looking up and realizing I had never understood how small a man could truly be.

I remember waiting for its head to appear. It took so long that I wondered if the thing had no end. The sea broke against scales that flashed green whenever they caught the light as it turned slowly, its body disappearing beneath the water in the same great spiral with which it had risen. The sea rolled for what felt like an eternity after it vanished.

We never caught another fish that day.

It was only years later that I understood why that frightened me more than anything else. Whatever moved beneath the sea had been so far below the surface that it appeared as nothing more than a shadow, and yet it had stirred enough water to reach us. I have spent more nights than I care to admit wondering how large something would have to be to do such a thing.

I have never found an answer that let me sleep