Call Me Ishmael
I was drifting. Low blood sugar. Air like soup. I hadn’t eaten all day, or maybe I had, I don’t remember. I was walking through a supermarket in Japan, one of those blinding clean ones, all neon light and weird elevator music. Cold, too cold. Fish eyes watching me from slabs of ice. And then there it was. Whale. Rae flesh like wet velvet. Whispering to me from behind cellophane. I stared at it the way I stare at someone I’ve seen in a dream before. Wrong and perfect at the same time. Bought it like buying a secret. No one stopped me. No one said a word. The machine at the checkout beeped after I fed it with some yen. And then the small pieces of a slaughtered giant were mine.
Back home, the silence was loud. I didn’t cook it. Just opened the package, dropped the slices on some shredded carrots and radish, squeezed a lemon wedge like a little prayer. Ate them with some metal chopsticks. They tasted like horse. Like blood and memory. I thought about the whales. I thought about the protests and the documentaries and the guilt people wear like expensive jackets. I thought about extinction and betrayal and all the things I’m not supposed to do. But mostly I thought: When else? When else would I ever get to know this feeling, this very specific wrongness melting in my mouth like ice cream? I ate the whole thing. Slowly. Like a ritual. Like a dare.
And when it was done, I just sat there. No music. No talking. Just the low hum of the fridge and the sound of my own breath, sticky and strange, rising and falling like I was learning how to breathe for the first time. There was something curling in my gut, not quite guilt, not quite satisfaction - something older. Animal. Primitive. Like I’d remembered something I shouldn’t have. Next time, I want to eat dolphin. I don’t know why exactly. Maybe to feel worse. Maybe to feel better. Or maybe just to feel anything at all. To scratch some unreachable itch deep inside me. It’s not about taste. It’s not even about curiosity anymore. It’s about going somewhere I can’t come back from.