One Summer
One summer the clouds changed into whales.
Before that happened it had been one of those disquiet summers. People had stopped at the seashore to watch lightning storms gathering on the horizon; they had quit their jobs and their failed marriages, instead massing lazily in the city’s parks; they had complained about the heat and stayed awake all night, smoking cigarettes and reading the existentialists. The price of oil was at an all-time high and this was causing problems, but nobody really understood why, or for who, because they had all sold their cars, having decided there was no sense going anywhere, not really.
Nobody had expected the clouds to change into whales, but when it happened they realised they had been waiting for it. All the signs had pointed toward this, or if not this specifically, then something like it. People had known things could not continue the way they were going. This was it, they declared en masse in sighing voices—to their lovers as they slept under just the sheets; to their children who they were teaching to paint (having taken them out of school in order to spend more time together); to strangers who shared the same park bench and watched the same pigeons. This was it, they announced declaratively. Now things would have to be different.
Like the clouds they replaced, the whales were inconstant. Sometimes there would be a single large one, rolling over and humming to himself on the edge of the sky. Sometimes a pod of calves and mothers would sing through the city, so low as to come between the skyscrapers (which were empty, everyone having quit their jobs). Sometimes there would only be three or four, delicately spaced, high, high up, so small you might think they were evening stars. And of course, sometimes the sky would be completely clear and blue—it was summer after all—but even then, something in that clarity would suggest humpbacks or orcas.
Then summer ended, and the clouds changed back into clouds. People began walking right past the seashore, even during a storm; they began applying for jobs and rekindling their failed marriages; they sold their copies of Nausea and slept soundly right through the night. The price of oil returned to normal. They bought new cars, then went on trips to the countryside to visit their parents.
Sometimes people still spoke of the summer of the whales; but in general they forgot, or at least decided it was not polite conversation to bring up.
Zac Hing is an artiste residing in Pōneke, Aotearoa… he enjoys chocolate plant-based ice cream and nothing besides.