Fish Out of Water
by Julianne Metzger Taylor
“Did you know that whales descended from wolves?” My friends thought this question was silly. They scoffed. It hurt. It is sort of true. Technically, whales evolved from an ancient land mammal that was likely an even-toed ungulate that ran on four legs. Like a hippopotamus. I’ve investigated this—where whales came from.
The first time it happened, the evening news had closed with, “Remember tonight’s once-in-a-century blue supermoon.” So, I stayed up, spending the night staring at the indefinite black sky from my bedroom window.
Slowly, the moon shed its cloud cover. I marveled at its giant cerulean beauty. When my hair stood on end, and my flesh began to tingle, I assumed it was just a profound sense of wonder.
But then my skin stretched and ripped. I looked down in horror as my fingers fused together. Teeth fell from my mouth onto my new, now blue, triangular fin-like appendages. My muscle, fat, and sinew morphed and grew with alarming speed. I broke my bed and toppled my walls. Under my girth, the second floor of my house shuddered and then collapsed upon the first.
In mere seconds, I’d flattened my whole home. Maybe the shed. Probably, mom’s tomatoes. It was hard to tell.
I lay there, beached in moonlight. Immobile, terrified, and excruciatingly parched. I flopped around, emitting only a series of long, deep, and mournful cries. And then, an exquisite oblivion engulfed me.
I didn’t know then, but that was the first night I turned into a werewhale. As my flesh sprang forward, some ancient identity did also. I was unable to articulate it. Like, a tree knows it’s a tree but lacks the language to say how or explain why.
The next morning, a firefighter lifted me from the wreckage. Thank goodness for the benign neglect of the late nineties. My parents had been away all night at the neighbor’s cosmopolitan-soaked cocktail party. The authorities thought it was a fluke gas leak and somehow fire-less explosion. The adults couldn’t begin to fathom the irony in saying it was a miracle that I survived.
My parents chalked my suddenly weird behavior up to the trauma of losing the house. In their defense, it was partly true. I was ashamed. It was my fault. I wondered what I’d lose, or who I would harm, when it happened again.
I tried to be logical, establish just the facts. Did the math. To have razed the entire house, plus the vegetable garden, I had to have been at least one hundred feet long. I researched lunar phenomena and human transfiguration myths. And finally, I considered the commonalities of wolves, blue whales, and the moon.
I attempted to broach the topic with friends. I asked my parents leading questions to uncover what I assumed was our dark family secret. But everyone just shook their heads, chagrined.
They said, “Whales!? Again?”
They all tired of my fixations on real and fantastical creatures, of my non-sequiturs into evolutionary mammalian factoids. My parents refused to ferry me to the aquarium and/or the planetarium.
So, I devoted hours to the rudimentary internet with unique Booleans and search phrases:
“Whale AND girl”
“Werewhale NOT werewolf.”
“Supermoon anomaly OR deadly brain tumor.”
What I found was this. Werewolves were a thing. Whales were a thing. But according to the public library and the internet, I was a thing that did not exist.
I was an alone thing.
I waited for years. Nothing happened. I doodled on notebooks, “Where whale?” I concluded I’d made it all up. A carbon-monoxide-induced psychosis, a silly fever dream. Hoping for the erasure of the memories, I repeated the mantra: I AM A NORMAL HUMAN. I DO NOT HAVE ANY WEIRDLY SPECIFIC TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCES OR POSSIBLY MAGICAL SECRETS.
Whenever a blue moon was predicted, inevitably, I’d envision the sound of my parents’ bones crunching under my onerous weight. Invasive images of squelching destruction under tons of blubber. Before I knew it, I’d sneak out to the woods, toting a bag of spare clothes.
I finally werewhaled again when I was seventeen.
I was walking in a canola field near my parents’ new farm. Another blue moon. This time, the tearing bloat, the terrible aridness of it all, was overshadowed by delicious relief. As a rickety fence post pierced my expanding body, an ecstatic “it’s real” resounded in my mind.
When I awoke, I cried at the sight of the beautiful, oozing pencil-sized puncture wound. Finally, bodily proof. The newspapers reported that the damage to the field was caused by crop circles. Funnily, aliens were the most plausible story.
The puncture got infected. My mom took me to the doctor. He took her aside and explained self-harm. Had she noticed a change in behavior? She told him about the gas leak, the obsessions. I couldn’t hear what they said next.
My parents suggested I channel my fascination into higher education, toward a future career in marine biology. They could not understand, I did not love the ocean. I was compelled by it, and I could not articulate the difference. It didn’t work out, for obvious reasons. I felt ill when I was asked to dissect a fish. I blushed at the mere mention of sea mammals or the lunar effect on tides. I found I couldn’t sleep on campus. I imagined squishing students and bursting through dorms.
Now, I coast between beachside towns. I find rest surrounded by the quiet of wide, empty berths of sand. It isn’t every blue moon. Maybe it has nothing to do with that. I’ve yet to find real answers. The next time it happens, I will be in the right place.
Julianne Metzger Taylor is a multi-genre writer and NEOMFA student at Kent State University. She began her creative writing studies at Johns Hopkins University. A second-generation Filipino American and US Navy veteran, she hails from Virginia and now lives in Ohio.