Daughters of Whales by Martina Melgazzi

There is a place where you still exist.

No—three.

The first is among the coral atolls, the smoky ridges, the canyons of black basalt, the kelp meadows, the shafts of icy light we passed through together.

The second is beneath my vast and narrow tongue, where small pieces of you settled as I tried to teach you how to find the line that separates the world below from the one above—or joins them—without knowing you were already dead. You had been, from the very first moment you came out of me.

I held you between my teeth for weeks; together we swam six thousand eight hundred and forty kilometers.

Maybe she’s sleeping, I thought.

Maybe she’s tired. Maybe she’s hurt, maybe she just really needs to be rocked.

You weren’t my first calf, and you won’t be the last, but you’re the only one whose taste I’ve known—as your body swelled with rot and death.

Salt, rust, cloudy fat, rotting algae.

The third place is where I let you go.

A shadowy plateau at the base of the abyssal trench.

I was born there.

My mother pushed me out of her with a flick of her tail,

alongside other mothers, other calves.

The blood of our births danced through the currents for only a moment,

tasting the liquid world that would hold us for all our lives

just long enough for a gasp—

then it fell, as it always does,

carried down by bits of placenta dragging it to the seafloor.

There, at the bottom, blood and sand become one.

We always remain where we are born,

alongside the trace of our mothers.

I let you go.

I opened my mouth and you slipped down,

heavy with water and gas.

You are where I am too,

and where they all have been before us.

Daughters of whales,

daughters of the ocean.

Martina works as a freelance copywriter and content creator. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Modern Literature and a Master’s in Digital Content Management. Cuorespina is her debut novel, and she is currently working on other narrative projects. For Martina, writing means creating disorder — in one’s ideas, in certainties, in how we see the world. Too much order is the enemy of imagination and doesn’t encourage us to ask the right questions.