It had washed up like God draped in his sweetest fineries and as the children poked and prodded at it, they couldn't quite comprehend the giant beast that lay before them. What was once a proud voyager of the seas had become a dead, sullen carcass collecting sand. Thomas, the oldest boy had never seen a whale before but he'd read about it in a dusty book he found in a library. This smart, ancient creature had outfoxed even the most cunning sailors and now it lay here, open and vulnerable for these little children to inspect it like an old man at a funeral. Thomas remembered the day he saw his dead grandfather, dressed in an old suit in an open casket. Did this whale look any different? Thomas moved around to face the beast eye to eye. He starred at its eye and saw that the whale had a little life left in its cold, human eyes and as Thomas watched it, he thought he heard the whale's heart beating 'tap, tap, tap'. And as Thomas's eyes filled with tears and his friends laughed at this abominable and heartbreakingly beautiful creature in its final moments of life - Thomas put his hands on it. He tried with all his might to move it back into the ocean as its giant brain longed for the watery home it needed most vitally but it was like blue rock, cold and immobile and there it laid, in its horrendous finery - dying in a sandy grave. As the other children soon grew bored of the dead God and went down the beach to build a sandcastle, Thomas sat next to the whale and looked out at the sweet blue ocean behind it. How appalling it was, Thomas thought that this beautiful whale had washed up on this sandy beach and died alone and vulnerable as little children who could not understand its beauty laughed at it like a circus freak. How appalling that it died beneath a smiling sun. How appalling that it couldn't sing anymore. Thomas gathered stones and laid them around the whale and prayed for it, trying childishly to remember the prayers he had ignored at church. Soon, the men would come and take pictures of the beast, maybe they'd even put it in a truck and take it from town to town as a circus exhibit. Thomas looked up at the sky as the sun began to set and wondered if there really was a heaven. Was this the saddened God that the priest talked of every Sunday? Had he fallen from the rainbow sky and dried up like an old man, buried with the worms? There was something gruesomely beautiful about the dead whale, like the make-up that Thomas's mother applied to her dead father's face before he was lifted into the open casket, the shoe polish applied to the dead man's shoes. Why did they need to make the dead look beautiful, to cover up the atrocity? Thomas looked again into the whale's eye and let out a soft sigh, a grave realization of his own mortality. The simple knowledge that he too would face this fate, one day.
And as Thomas slowly began to walk up the beach, he looked back one time as the whale's body glistened in the blue evening light and he thought about the day he read Moby Dick. To him and his child-like imagination, this beautiful animal had seemed so powerful, so dignified and now it stood there, a colossal reminder of the power of death and the weakness of beauty. He thought about his mother's face, her beautiful smile, the warmth it left in his beating heart. He thought about the pretty girl he sat next to on the yellow school bus. And then, running back up the beach he looked back into the eye of the whale and with all his might, he slowly closed its giant eye and honored it, in a way only a child could. And knowing that this small gesture was enough, he turned back around and began to walk home. Slowly the ancient beast grew smaller and smaller till finally it was only a dark shadow, cast against the moonlit beach. We all become shadows, Thomas thought - beautiful ruins of God's perfect creation but in a strange way, in our brokenness - we form a more perfect shape, for anything that breathes must also die and anything that is dead, has once felt the energy of life. Thomas never forgot the whale or its giant eye, it lingered with him forever but he never came back to the beach, he never found out what became of it. For it often happens that whales wash up on beaches and children learn of death just as the birds sing in the trees and babies spring into existence.
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