Competition Twenty-Seven Highly Commended: The Boy On The Ann Alexander by S.A. Greene

The boy on the Ann Alexander doesn’t want to die. Not on a velvet night like this under a sky hung with a million laughing stars. Not when tomorrow might bring dolphins playing alongside the ship, beckoning him like messengers from a better place.

The boy on the Ann Alexander is thirteen but his eyes are older. He never saw a whale before this voyage but he knows that one can yield seventy barrels of oil. He knows they’re bigger than the bear he saw when he was small – a showman brought it to their town in chains and made it dance. The crowd went wild but the boy looked in its eyes and wept.

2000 miles off the coast of Peru the cry goes up for a whale. The boy opens his mouth to join in but the whale’s head breaks the surface and sound and senses die as the boy tries to comprehend its size, tries to match the scale of it with his world.

A whaleboat goes out and the boy winces as a harpoon lands, then gasps as the whale drags the boat on a ‘Nantucket sleigh ride’. The boy is glad when all the men are saved, though most have used him ill. Captain Deblois himself takes out a second boat and tries and fails again.

That night the boy is wakened by a loud ungodly crunch, as if he’s inside a bone that’s being broken. The whale rams the Ann Alexander twice – once for each harpoon piercing its face. The boy doesn’t want to die tonight. He wants to turn fourteen. He’s frightened and he doesn’t want the ship to sink, but when he sees the creature’s giant tormented eye a tiny dancing part of him is glad the whale is winning.

S A Greene’s short fiction has appeared before in Free Flash Fiction, as well as in trampset, Mslexia, Fictive Dream, New Flash Fiction Review, Ellipsis Zine, The Phare, Flash Flood, Reflex, Funny Pearls, and other fabulous places.

@sagreene1.bsky.social

Image – ‘Man upon the sea – or, a history of maritime adventure, exploration, and discovery, from the earliest ages to the present time (1858)’ courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.