She smelled the whale before she saw it: Camembert and coral. Growing up, she’d been taught to disdain the mixture of cheese and fish, and sitting there on the Zodiac, she could not square her bias with the nature of it all. On the trip out, she’d imagined her own drowning, calculated the distance to shore in hours of dragging her sneakers behind her, buoyed to her back by the life vest, but as the minke whale humped up and exhaled, she leaned toward the pontoon. Breathed in dragon-spined sea. Exhaled stale coffee. The crackle of rebirth split the air around them as she stared at the length of the mammal, camouflaged against the gray waves.
There and then gone.
“You’re going to fall overboard,” her partner said, his hand gentle on her shoulder but she wriggled it off, her skin sloughing with it, her body, oiled, mono-finned sliding toward the edge.
She had never felt the urgency to leave a place outside of a Zoom performance review until now, especially when she did not know how to swim. But being, she decided, was half of it. The plastic decking was sharp against her tender scales, and she threw herself off the side, bellyflopping into the sea. Free-falling deep into darkness and cold, she put her arms out, waiting for something, anything, a hidden animalistic instinct perhaps, to catch her before she ran out of air.
Some baby birds, she realized in distress, died on first flight. But that did not stop them from leaping.
