The Dream
They called him Queequeg. We were both of us in search of a whaler to throw our bindles aboard, he a harpooner of some savage repute, I a restless knockabout in search of lurching adventure and the fan-tailed rage that authored the whitecaps. Lodging was scarce and we shared a bed. He was…a most fetching cannibal! So much so I didn’t think I’d mind it if he took to gnawing on my ankle bone a bit. It was the ensorcelled skin that made me gape, festooned in ink like the spiraling black labyrinth I see each night when my eyes first twitch with sleep. I looked at him and promptly entered a dream.
In the Savage Embrace
I awoke gauzily flummoxed at the feel of the world pressing against me, that magnificent bulwark of a nose nuzzling my neck, his arm girding me round like a bandolier. At last, I thought, at last, the brawny brown arm of fate is upon me. It was a marriage sound as any other.
Aboard the Pequod
We found our whaler and the peg-legged man whose fond mania gave it motion, and off we went, high-tailing it toward high jinks on the high seas! Our ears acrawl with the strains of shanties to come, which is a merrier itch than the vermin of loneliness.
Cetology
The spouting fish of a man’s heart can never be truly caught, though we persuade ourselves otherwise until we liberate our bodies of every extremity.
Love Spares No Spar
That man, our captain, whose stuttering gait pounded like a menacing midnight rap upon the door, he sat each night in his quarters in the grips of a fever only the ravenous love of a pale colossus could cure, but Q and I were busy ourselves listening to the sea air whistle through the rigging, kneading together the spermaceti of the day’s catch, and discussing the morrow’s labor. I carved our names upon the bowsprit, Queequeg and Ishmael were here, knowing full well that the here fixed in this moment was in a state of flank-speed flux, everywhere and nowhere, Q & I just like the near-and-far billowings of God Himself, and this thought lent me no small measure of joy. I smiled at Q the opulent smile of a man who has amassed more wealth than he can squander in one lifetime, and he touched my arm with his pipe and snorted.
Oil
Rare as the milk of kings whose teats we suckle at in moments of unearthly astonishment, it is extracted from the noble brow to fuel the lamp by which we read, testimony to the essential role the great fish plays in our enlightenment.
Mortal Man
Such a tale can end in only one way: the sea uncorked at last by the arrogance of inclement men, the ship, the crew, the sky itself circled the fast-swirling vortex, and all humanity was sucked into that fishless oblivion on the underside of the ocean…
Epilogue
Ah Queequeg! Ah Love!
•••
© Kellie Wells