Keep Her by Leora Krygier

Author:Leora Krygier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2016-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

January 10, 2008

Dear Alex—

The numbers are hard to believe. Hundreds of thousands of whales have been killed in the last three hundred years. Even the recent commercial whaling ban hasn’t stopped the slaughter. They come up with ways to get around the ban, finding loopholes. You were the one who told me this, long ago. You sat up nights reading all the ugly statistics, but I only half listened. Sure, I found the book in a sale bin of the bookstore and gave it to you, but you were the one who read it, inhaled it, every night. The book wasn’t some old story for you, some footnote in history, irrelevant. It was the book that lit you up, and you battled Captain Ahab and his demons in your own dreams. I could hear you talking in your sleep trying to both reason and argue with him and with all the captains that came before and after him.

Dad and I packed up all the things in your room. Mom couldn’t do it. We gave a lot away, your clothes, your books, your games. Dad asked me if I wanted anything to remember you by, and there was only one thing I wanted: your book. I put it on a shelf above my desk, but I couldn’t open it, let alone read it. For months it gathered dust on the shelf, until one night I dreamt we were on Jack’s boat and the book had fallen in the water. You dove in to get it, then climbed back into the boat and gave it to me. In the morning I opened the book and started to read it. I felt your presence in it, in every page, and when I finished it, days later, I knew what I needed to do, and that’s when I made my promise to you.

Our time is now and this is no dream.

The RIB inflatable is equipped with a water pump and spray system to frustrate the hunter ships. I’m in the RIB with Olivia, but there’s no time to think about her. There’s no time to think about the night we spent together.

Small and agile, the inflatable boat has a delicate steering system and can be held just off the bow of the hunter ship at high speeds and in pack ice. It can aim a water spray up onto the harpoon deck and the spotter’s towers, causing the hunters to lose sight of the whales and miss their shots. But the inflatable has very little protection against the water cannons, barely a windscreen.

We are in full-speed pursuit. They are dead ahead, and we can hear the loudspeakers with their warnings not to approach their ship.

Keep away.

Keep away from our ship.

We carry only handwritten placards in bright yellow. Our placards try to refute the word that’s stenciled in white on their ship, “Research.” The word is cynical. The word is camouflage. There’s no research being done on this ship, no science, only destruction.

And then we hear it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.