‘Whale Fall’ by Alvin Park

I slung the axe, hoe, and shovel over my shoulder, tools that once dredged potatoes, cut buckwheat, and softened the rich dirt that had stopped saying I give. Now tools for cutting barnacled skin and heavy flesh packed tight into burlap.

Sink into the oceanic depths of this week’s recommendation, the grand prize winner of SmokeLong’s Flash Fiction Award, ‘Whale Fall’ by Alvin Park. This story is as rich and immersive as it is soaked in the idea of a sort of lucid, helpless, and drifting loss. There is reluctance in letting go, and the running theme (and sensation) of hunger. The act of never being sated, her dissatisfaction, his desperation to regain what was once lost. Empty stomachs craving something more than this gradual deterioration.

She rinsed the meat until the sea separated from sinew. In the pan, the fat blistered and melted, filling the kitchen with the smell of cold sand and iron.

This story is rich and dark and eerily, distantly reflective of our own world today while still holding remnants of fable, a certain distance from the contemporary. But whether that distance places this story in the past, or in the future, remains uncertain. Premonition or precedence. ‘Whale Fall’ will leave you hungry, mouth watering, heart yearning for something more, the imprecise and undefinable nature of which will leave you senseless and numb.

Still, she boiled the bone shards in seawater to turn the marrow to soup. How thin and clear the broth. How the bones had little left to give.

SmokeLong Quarterly