A small, bright-orange boat floats in the ocean, bobbing up and down like a Cheez-It in the deep end of God’s swimming pool.
A young man, Daniel—thirty-one-years-old, buzzed head, eyes like boarded up windows, and a beard longer and more disgruntled than a Civil War general’s—sits at one end of the motorless boat. A six-foot-tall blue whale wearing a fanny pack who looks like he’s just finished watching Titanic sits at the other.
“I’m never going to see Laura again,” Daniel says out of nowhere, his tone of voice sounding the way the sad-looking blue whale looks.
“I’m never going to finish my novel,” the sad-looking blue whale says, his tone of voice also sounding the way he looks.
“You’re writing a novel?”
The sad-looking blue whale nods. Even his nod is sad-looking and looks like it just finished watching Titanic.
“What’s it about?” Daniel asks.
“It’s so hot,” the sad-looking blue whale says as he looks up at the sun and wipes sweat from his forehead. “Sorry. What’d you say?”
“Your novel,” Daniel says. “What’s it about?”
“Oh…” the sad-looking blue whale says, then pauses and thinks, or pauses and pretends to think, Daniel isn’t sure.
“I dunno. It’s about nothing, really,” the sad-looking blue whale says, intentionally staring down at the boat’s floor as if trying to punctuate the end of this novel-geared conversation by purposefully severing eye contact with Daniel, leaving Daniel to momentarily feel bad, as if he embarrassed the sad-looking blue whale by asking him about his novel.
“Sorry,” Daniel says. “I hate when people ask me what my novel’s about. Ya know… whenever I let it slip I’m working on one.”
“It’s okay,” the sad-looking blue whale says. And then, after a little while, “The frailty of life… If I had to say my novel was about something, I guess I’d say it’s about that.”
“Hmm…” Daniel says. “When I was eleven, I wrote a novel—the only one I ever finished—and the protagonist was a fart contemplating its brief mortality. It was over eight-hundred pages long.”
“Passing Gas,” Daniel adds. “That was the title of it… Passing Gas.”
“Our books sound very different,” the sad-looking blue whale says.
Daniel nods even though he disagrees with the sad-looking blue whale.
To Daniel, it sounds like their novels could be brothers.
“Are you sure you don’t know how to swim?” Daniel asks the sad-looking blue whale as he looks over the ocean, examining the water that’s beginning to take on a mesmerizing, Lindy-Hopping quality.
“I’m a sad-looking blue whale,” the sad-looking blue whale says. “None of us know how to swim.
Daniel vaguely nods.
“Too sad to have ever learned,” the sad-looking blue whale elaborates.
“Too busy watching Titanic,” the sad-looking blue whale elaborates even further.
“I liked the part where she showed her breasts,” Daniel says hypnotically, now staring out across the ocean as if trying to transform the water into something more exciting to look at, like an entire ocean made out of Kate Winslet breasts bobbing up and down, jiggling, all of her breasts—thousands upon thousands of them—singing with soft, soothing, fluent motions, harmonizing with one another, lulling Daniel and the sad-looking blue whale to sleep with their song of the ocean as the sun tucks them in with its unending, pile-driving heat.
“I liked all the sad parts. Her breasts were nice and all I guess, but they just weren’t sad-looking enough for my taste,” the sad-looking blue whale says as he wipes more sweat from his glossy head. “Maybe if they looked more like that one shot where the elderly husband and wife were lying in bed and holding each other as water flooded into their room. Then I probably would’ve enjoyed looking at her breasts more.”
“Breast stroke…” Daniel accidentally mutters out loud, imagining himself swimming in an ocean of Kate Winslet-breasts.
“What?” the sad-looking blue whale asks.
“I think the heat’s starting to get to me,” Daniel says as he furrows his brow, really feeling the sunburn on his forehead for the first time.
Sunburn…says Daniel’s brain.
Kate Winslet’s breasts…
Kate Winslet’s sunburned breasts…
Laura’s sunburned breasts…
Rubbing aloe on Laura’s big, natural, sunburned breasts…
Applying aloe softly, lovingly…
Rubbing it all over…
Rubbing it underneath her breasts “just to be thorough…”
“Thank you, bay-bee. You’re such a good man…”
Putting the cap back on the aloe and staring at Laura’s sunburned breasts…
Like two flaming zeppelins slowly going down, screaming, milky and beautiful…
KA-BOOM!
KA-BOOM!
“You okay?” the sad-looking blue whale asks, his question extinguishing the flaming carcasses of Laura’s zeppelin-breasts in Daniel’s head.
“Yeah,” Daniel answers, unsure of how long he’s been spaced out. “Why?”
The sad-looking blue whale shrugs.
“You just looked different all of a sudden.”
“Different?”
“Yeah,” the sad-looking blue whale says, then squints, peering further into Daniel’s eyes. “Like you had two charred Hindenburgs in your head or something.”
Embarrassed, Daniel looks away. The sad-looking blue whale turns his attention to the empty Big Mac container on the boat’s floor, sitting in-between him and Daniel like a small and unusual campfire just beginning to smolder.
“He still not talking to you?” the sad-looking blue whale asks.
Daniel looks down at the empty Big Mac container and shakes his head.
“You’ll hear him when he does. And see it too. His lid flaps up and down. Like this.”
Daniel puts his elbows together and makes his arms flap up and down, imitating the empty Big Mac container’s lid whenever it talks to him. Not knowing what to say, or having nothing to say, the sad-looking blue whale kind of nods.
“What? You don’t believe me?” Daniel says, his tone of voice suddenly becoming mildly aggressive and threatening, like a maliciously pointed spork.
“I never said that,” the sad-looking blue whale says.
“I’m not crazy. He’s just pissed at me right now so he’s not talking to me. And I can’t really blame him either.”
As if having nothing more to say on the matter, the sad-looking blue whale fixes his attention on the horizon. Daniel sighs. He leans over and presses the play button on the small round boombox beside him but, as expected, it makes the same, dull, lifeless click as the last time he pressed it. Daniel leans back in his seat, sighs again.
“You should’ve double checked,” the sad-looking blue whale says. “Made sure the batteries were still good.”
“You were the one who brought the boombox,” Daniel says, bludgeoning the sad-looking blue whale over the head with a dull and pained look of utter incredulousness.
“Oh… Yeah…” the sad-looking blue whale says.
“You still think they’ll be able to find us anyway? Ya know, without the song playing?”
“Maybe.”
“Really?”
“But probably not,” the sad-looking blue whale admits.
Feeling defeated, Daniel holds his face in his hands and rests his elbows on his knees. The sun screams at the back of his neck like Robert Plant if Robert Plant had vocal cords made of plasma.
“I’m sorry I got you into this,” Daniel says through his hands. “I dunno… Maybe this was all just one big mistake.”
The sad-looking blue whale doesn’t respond, and when Daniel looks up at him something about the sad-looking blue whale seems to flicker and shake, like the screen of a paused VHS tape trying to hold a frame in place.
Like the screen of a paused Titanic VHS tape trying to hold a frame in place…says Daniel’s brain.
Titanic…
Titanic on VHS…
Kate Winslet…
Kate Winslet’s breasts on VHS…
Laura’s breasts on VHS…
Laura’s breasts on VHS are even better than Kate Winslet’s breasts in HD…
Laura…
Laura, Laura, Laura…
Say her name three times out loud and maybe she’ll appear like Beetlejuice…
“I need to tell you something. Something I should’ve told you before we left. But, I dunno… I just wasn’t sure how to tell you,” the sad-looking blue whale says.
“Okay…”
“Your heart… you want to bury it, right?”
Daniel nods.
“Beneath the ocean floor?”
Daniel nods again.
“Okay. And I’m going to help you do that. Well, I mean we. We’re going to help you do that. Me and the sad-looking blue whales back home.”
“Back home?”
“Yeah. In our underwater kingdom. It’s like a big snow globe on the ocean floor. But minus the water and snow. And with a lot more Titanic statues and monuments.”
Too fried from the unrelenting, bully-like sun to begin to understand what the sad-looking blue whale is trying to say to him, Daniel stares down at the empty Big Mac container, focusing on the grease spot on its top.
It’s shaped like Sweden…says Daniel’s brain even though Daniel’s brain has no idea what Sweden is shaped like, nor could it find Sweden on a map in under fifteen seconds if someone held a gun to his head.
Sweden…says Daniel’s brain.
Sweden, Sweden, Sweden…
Say the country’s name three times out loud and maybe you’ll appear there…
“You’re The Chosen One,” the sad-looking blue whale says to Daniel. “I guess that’s what I’m trying to get at.”
The Chosen One…Daniel’s brain echoes with a delirious pride, momentarily making him feel special and unique, reminding him of a time back in fifth grade when his teacher, Mrs. Burke, read a short story Daniel wrote for English class and then told him, “You have a very special creative talent you’re going to do great things with someday.” The next day, truly inspired for, perhaps, the first time in his short life, Daniel wrote the first twenty pages of his epic tome, “Passing Gas.”
“Laura, Laura, Laura…” Daniel says under his breath, but to his disappointment, although not his surprise, Laura doesn’t appear, and the bright-orange boat just continues apolitically bobbing up and down in the water, leaving Daniel and the sad-looking blue whale to do nothing but, most likely, wait for a slow-roasting, pointless death.
***
Homeless is puttering along in NYC. He often wonders whatever happened to predictability, the milkman, the paperboy, evening TV. His only dream anymore is to become an old man who dedicates most of his free time to feeding pigeons in the park. That or to meet Debbie Harry. He’s the author of four other books, including the novel, “This Hasn’t Been a Very Magical Journey So Far” (Expat Press). His second novel, “My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor,” will be published by Clash Books in the fall of 2024.
***
Claire Hopple is the author of six books. Her fiction has appeared in Wigleaf, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Forever Mag, Peach Mag, and others. She’s the fiction editor at XRAY. More at clairehopple.com.
Rejection Letters 