What We Fed to the Manticore by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri

Author:Talia Lakshmi Kolluri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 2022-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

That night, the whale visited Bendiks again in his dream. The team had turned inland, toward the ice sheet, but in the second world of slumber, Bendiks dreamed that they were camping by the edge of the water in late spring, during the season of midnight sun, and everything glowed. The sea, gently lapping at the edge of the coast, appeared molten. Bendiks lifted his head and was overcome by the profound beauty of this incandescent day, and he struggled to understand why, until he realized that he must be seeing pink. He must be seeing orange. The sound of bowhead whales sending mating songs across hundreds of miles rang out around him.

One of them rose from the dark water out of nothing. His inky skin merged with the sea, except for his luminous white chin. The whale stared at Bendiks in silence until Bendiks’s ears were filled with the pulsing of his own heart. He raised his head to try to catch the scent of the rest of the pack, only to discover he was on an ice floe, alone in the middle of the Arctic. The glow of the forever day subsided into polar night faster than it ever had in his waking life, and Bendiks saw that the chain that always kept him tethered to the others extended off the edge of the ice floe and into the sea. He was uncertain whether he was now chained to nothing or, more terrifyingly, chained to the whale.

“What do you want from me?” he asked the whale, trying to stare him down.

“To eat you,” the whale said. And then he plunged under the surface of the water.

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