K. T. Moore: WHALE CRATERS • Cleaver Magazine

K. T. Moore
WHALE CRATERS

“Had one come down overnight.”

Eden was waiting for him in the car park. Tayne felt himself sweating by the time he reached her, and as the wind kicked up, a shiver started between his shoulder blades. Eden had her hands tucked into her jumper sleeves; Tayne peered at what remained of the lookout and he wished he’d thought to bring a pair of mittens.

“One landed in Port Chalmers a few months back,” he said, staggering as he joined Eden at the cliff edge. Along with the rotted kelp, all of Matakaea smelled like an abattoir floor rinsed in brine. “Nearly crushed a group of students doing the crags.”

The whale had landed at the tideline; the impact had gauged a hole in the headland large enough to reshape the anatomy of the coast, an entire promontory crushed to rock dust beneath fat and bone and blubber. The one at Port Chalmers had fallen far enough that when it landed, the force of impact did half the disposal team’s work for them; for weeks meat chunks were turning up as far south as Dunedin.

Eden passed Tayne the pair of binoculars hanging at her throat, and looking through them, he could make out the shape of the whale’s head. The tail and fins were still intact, but the rocks had split its stomach, exposing red and slippery muscles, intestines as thick as anchor chains and already covered in gull shit. It hadn’t fallen as far as the one in Port Chalmers.

“A juvenile, I reckon,” said Eden, nodding at him. “I’ve got Terry coming in from Otago with the earwax kit, but going by its size and the fact it didn’t splatter from here to Oamaru, it didn’t fall from any real height. Young, or maybe sick.”

Tayne smacked at the sandflies, stirred to a frenzy by rotting flesh. “I think it’s the new smelter on Taiaroa Head that’s doing it. Putting toxins into the air.”

“A biopsy will tell us if it’s got any particulates in its blood.” Eden took the binoculars back. “Provided Terry gets a move on.

“At the rate they’re coming down,” she smiled, tight and bloodless, the same shade of white as the fat and viscera tangled in the kelp, “we’re going to have to re-survey half the country’s beaches and foreshores, the whale-shaped cracks in the coast…”

Tayne tugged on his hood; the palls of gray rain passed a faint pearlescence, washing clean the carcass pitched across the point. He shivered again.

The horizon churned winedark, the same color as the sea, swollen with its dense forests of rimurapa. Waves dashed themselves to spray against the body of the whale, its innards coiling in the tide and its blood gathering in crimson foam at the edges of the sand.

The wind buffeted Tayne’s back and lowed forlornly against the cliffsides, as though rushing in to fill the air left empty by the whale’s fall.

Kaitlin “K.T.” Moore (they/them) is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose dissertation considers how plural cosmological systems might move towards realizing relations within and across physics, literature, ethics, and sustainability. They are an acclaimed amateur astrophotographer, and their photography has been featured by LiveScience and the Overture Center for the Arts. Between dissertation research, stargazing, and video games, they write the occasional poem or short story. K. T.’s flash fiction piece “Whale Craters” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest.