Whalefall
- Publication: Alchemy
- Year: 2025
- Author or artist: Cassius Wolfstar (Alchemy Editor)
- Type: Poem
I’m shedding my skin, and not graceful and all at once like a snake— more like how a whale’s skin builds up and grows loose and itchy around it before sloughing off in nauseatingly large chunks, billowing in the once pristine seas like sheer curtains tossed in by a hurricane.
Behemoth of the deep that I have become, straining in discomfort to scratch on anything I can find purchase against, I crash gently from Me into You, with force strong enough to kill. If there is any air in your lungs, it leaves faster than you’re able to admit.
So you sink with me.
To hold my hand while we tumble at your speed to the depths of my depravity would be too great an honor. I’ve turned my hands into fins, my sweet smile into impossible teeth and melon and cavernous space fit to fill with water and suck you deeply, crushingly far inside.
It’s so cold you don’t even shiver. The human body forgets itself this far down. Your feeble arteries can’t get your blood right. You could die down here just as easily as you could turn into a mermaid, chasing your own tail in a pitch darkness your eyes weren’t made for.
I could swallow you on the way down.
But something about the slow, gentle spiral of the way you fall reminds me for the last time of leaves before they touch land and begin to rot in new and familiar ways.
To follow you this far down is to seal my own fate. But like a child searching for worms in the playground dirt, I, the whale that I am, have always wanted to see the bottom of the blue hole.
(2)
With purpose I swirl and swirl down to see the worms I’ve yearned for since I was conceived.
There’s no glory in ascent here—to descend is to nourish and save the souls of the blind, the ravenous, and the forgotten.
I sing sweet one last time to announce my arrival, landing with a keening thud where my bones will eventually become home to a million writhing bodies.
The teeth that rip and the mouths that drill fill me with an ecstasy I may not have ever known if I had accepted an ascent from the gods above.
My loyalties lie below me, and my bones knew this before birth.
Even as worms bite and tear chunks of me, each and every one becomes part of me, carrying the whole and soul of who I am far away from here.
I am reborn as a single dangerous light in the dark, an old wanderer confused and floating free in unfamiliar bright. I have found new life in filling another for the last time, who fills another, who then becomes a controversial soup.
So I too become nothing more than a stew; a rigid brittle slime torn apart and filled with shit and macro-nutrients.
So then have at me as you may, worm that you are. Break through me and use me to get through your short, brutish, miserable life. I hope I serve you well.