Fluke

7: Rea of Sunshine

With my fourth cup of coffee on the table in front of me, pictures of whales on my laptop beside me, and rain splashing the roof above me, I was surrounded by happiness. Everyone had gone to bed, and even though it was one in the morning, I wasn't tired at all. Most of that was likely from the caffeine I had consumed, but just like the food web in the circle of life, my soul was consumed by something else.

Despite my most valiant efforts, I couldn't find a single whale in the entire database that matched my little buddy exactly.

Out of the thousands, there were maybe three whales with very similar patterns on their flukes, but I had no other indications to their identity. The fork tine pattern wasn't nearly as unique as I had thought, and any other clues like scars on Little Buddy's back from unfortunate accidents weren't visible in my photos. Instead, I had to detect microscopic variances like a "find the differences" puzzle at one in the morning, and the joke was that there were no freaking differences among the three possible choices.

It was so funny, I forgot to laugh.

As I stared at the computer screen, my eyes burning with sleepiness and frustration, the door swung open.

"Go to bed, Rea," the shadow man said.

"Logan?" I asked.

"Yep."

"What are you doing awake?" I grumbled.

"Why are you still working on your whales? It's not like you have anything to do tomorrow," Logan said.

"Well, you do have stuff to do tomorrow, so why were you just outside? It's raining, and you should probably be sleeping."

"If you'd like to get away from your whales for a minute, you should come see something."

Maybe refreshing my eyes would be a good idea. I spent hours just trying to narrow my choices down to three options, and I wasn't really sure if I was real anymore.

"Sure. Anything would be less depressing than not being able to figure out which whale my new best friend is," I said.

"I wouldn't be so sure about that, but that's just me. Come on. Bring your phone. I don't want you to slip and fall and kill your uncoordinated self," Logan said.

I stood up and followed him outside, where the puddles on the ground dampened the bottoms of my jeans.

"It's right around here somewhere. I think it washed up during high tide, and it's just—" Logan trailed off.

I laughed. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"I found it during my seal watch this evening, and little Racecar here," he flashed his phone light on the ground before us, and there laid a dead seal, "was barely alive then. He died a few minutes after I came over to see what happened."

The dead seal had a small pool of blood next to his head, but without much light, I couldn't tell where the bleeding had started on his grey speckled body.

"You named it Racecar?" I asked.

He nodded without taking his eyes off of his fallen seal.

"I'm sorry. What happened?" I asked.

"If I knew, I wouldn't have brought you out here to see this gruesome scene."

"I—I think I can handle seeing a dead seal. It's sad, but life goes on."

He looked up at me. "My specimen is dead, and you're treating this like a joke?"

I shook my head. "No, no. Of course not. I was just—"