Competition Thirty-Five Highly Commended: Whalebone Garden by Karen Arnold
There are pictures of the dead whale in the local paper.
I sit in the dunes staring at it’s grey bulk, arms wrapped around my knees, marram grass scratching the backs of my legs and I think of your body on that terrible day, how the stopping of one heart makes a void, pulling stars into a black hole. I think about the size of the absence left by the stopping of a whale heart.
I visit the beach every day, watching the disintegration, the melting, the yellow beaks snatching at flesh. I drape long brown lengths of kelp across the whale’s flank, build a cairn of sea smooth pebbles, keening into the wind for the whale and for you. Eventually Michael brings his digger and rolls what is left of my whale into a trench in the sand.
The gales that batter this coast are brutal. The whalebones become a jigsaw puzzle, exposed and scattered, spine like a string of pearls, ribs a vaulted church roof. I pay Michael to bring his digger again. He does as I ask, working at dawn in the quiet of a neap tide.
The whale bones rest in my garden. I plant roses and sweet peas. In the evenings I sit in my whalebone garden, watching the sun sink over the sea. Shadows fall, bird song ebbing away with the tide. One by one the stars return, the ones that resisted the pull of the void.
Karen Arnold is a writer and child psychotherapist. She came to writing later in life, but is busy making up for lost time. She is fascinated by the way we use narratives and storytelling to make sense of our human experience. She has won the Mslexia prize for flash fiction and has work in The Waxed Lemon, The Martello, and Banshee amongst others. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions. Her collection of flash fiction was published in September 2025.
Horse Dreams by Karen Arnold is available to purchase here…
Photo by Stephen Tierney via flickr.com
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