Ruth

The whale washed ashore. Its stillbody lay for days—turning and turningone new color after another. White,then gray, black, blue, then a sort of whiteagain. The water barely skimmedits bottom lip, mouth hung openlike a friendly doorway. The towniestook pictures inside its head captioned“Jonah!” with a cursory smile and dot eyesin their scrapbooks. Sprayed a bitof paint on its walls. The flesh startedto funk, smelling beyond the boardwalkthat certain scent of ending. By then,the townies had stopped with the visits,their cameras, the peeking overthe brushy hills to check if it remained.A few fishermen thought to push the fishback in, let its husk—little house—disappearinto the mouths of thousands of other fish.But their boats weren’t big enough and the netsthat tangled the whale to begin with were wasted.The job required hours of digging, big trucks,gravity. What was the whale rolled on its backand they covered the belly with dirt.