Thursday, September 17, 2015

They Were Dolphins, prologue and chapter 1

Prologue
He sings. He sings songs that dolphins have sung for eons. He sings of the vast cerulean ocean and the white-capped waves of seafoam. He sings of the blue skies filled with wispy strands of fleeting clouds. He sings to the graceful fish who dart hither and thither, shooting bright flashes of fish lightning from dark fish clouds. He sings below the water and above the waves before he crashes down again.

He sings of heart-breaking vistas of blue and gold and green, barely glimpsed from far away. He sings about the beauty of all living creatures and the interconnectedness of all things. He sings to trees and forests, and fruit trees and swaying kelp. He sings bright flashy notes and trills that draw curved lips of his fellow dolphins, sharp teeth bared in glee.

He sings of things that a dolphin knows not, including mysterious metal boxes in the sky that fly above the friendly birds. He sings of flotsam, strange pieces of unusual wonder that float between the vast dark see and bright wide sky. He sings of jetsam, pieces of boats that carry strangely shaped pink and brown animals that sometimes point their tails straight down in the ocean. He sings of lagan, the eventual resting place of all this junk at the bottom of the sea.

He sings of the faint stench near the shore where dead things float. He sings a dirge of mourning for the things that do not last and never could. He sings about the futility of swimming hard against currents for hours or days into exhaustion and ending up nowhere. He sings of loneliness of the silent depths where even the wrath of a hundred year storm is silenced and stilled and no creature moves for thousands of kilometres. He sings for the dark impenetrable depths that crush the soul.

He sings too much, and yet not enough. His singing isn’t heard but it is noticed when it is gone. He sings of waiting for death.

Chapter 1

The boy who was a dolphin walked to school. The way to the school was along a long street that sloped on the side of a mountain, then went down a very steep hill, followed a creek, and at arrived at the mouth of a valley. Along the street for the first leg there were residential one-storey homes on either side. They were mostly drab and dully coloured with peeling paint and exposed wood highlights. There was no sidewalk along the route, so the boy walked in the grass. He disliked the wet sensation of the dew on his shoes.

Halfway down the street there was a magical triangle of grass and two palm trees where three roads met. The ancient Romans called such a fork trivium, but he is unaware of this bit of information. The grassy triangle was a favourite meeting and playing place for the local children. The boy had never been up the street that goes higher in the mountain but vowed to find out what lay beyond someday.
Going down the steep hill was fun and if any children met up on the road in the morning, they would eye each other warily and then, as if spurred onward by an imaginary starter gun, they would sprint downhill at breakneck speeds. Fortunately, there were sidewalks on either side of the street starting at the top of the hill so that the children did not need to run in the street. However, the hero of our story would often run down the middle of the street following the cracks in the asphalt as if they were smaller roads drawn onto a grey map.

At the bottom of the hill there was a long stretch of undeveloped street blocks that were a wild mess of tangled bushes, vines, gardens, and even the town dump. The boy imagined the piles of discarded furniture, appliances, and toilets were stacked in a meaningful way, rather than the haphazard mess that it was.

He often told the other children stories of structures that he had seen in the dump: tall skyscrapers built of refrigerators and oven ranges, long winding walls stacked deep with washing machines and rusted hulks of automobiles, a swaying bridge slung between narrow towers of precariously stacked televisions, sofas, and mattresses. This last structure, the bridge, was captured in the perfect moment as a brown horse climbed gingerly up the steep stairs on one side and crossed the bridge of discarded effects to reach the other side of the block.

The children laughed at the boy’s stories and called him names and made fun of him. This was only natural, he reasoned, as he was a dolphin and humans were different and couldn’t understand him.

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