Lia Swope Mitchell - A Short Story
BEHEMOTH
The behemoth lay on the beach, dark against the brightening dawn. Breath shuddered through its massive torso, a slow draft emitting from its jaws. Useless fins twitched. Its upturned eye opened to the pale sky.
Bonnie Meacham saw it first. After her Elmer died, she’d started walking every day at sunrise, weather permitting, and today the weather was fine. The lake slapped gently at the shoreline as she picked her way down the path, hiking poles firmly in hand.
At first Bonnie thought it was a heap of sand covered in tarp, but as she got closer, she saw its slow expansion and knew she was looking at a living thing. A body the size of her garage, colossal and strange. After a few long blinks she pulled out her phone and called 911. Then she found a bench where she could wait.
Soon the sheriff arrived. Eric Sherburne, his name was, a big man now, but Bonnie could remember when he was knee-high. Slowly he walked down the wide pebble beach, taking in the scene.
“Morning, Mrs. Meacham,” he said. “Now what do we have here—whale, maybe?”
“Maybe,” Bonnie answered, though she didn’t think so. People told tall tales about whales in the Great Lakes, but those were just stories, so far as she knew. And anyway, wrong shape.
Sherburne stood a while with his arms folded over his chest, then pulled out his phone. “Guess I’ll call up the university down in the city. Maybe they’ll want to have a look at this thing,” he said. A car honked behind him. On the highway a car was slowing to a crawl, heads craning out passenger side windows. “Probably want some traffic control, too,” he added.
While he made his calls, Bonnie crept closer to the thing’s head, careful on the shifting pebbles. As big as a whale, with limp flippers, a snaking tail, and a long, tapering neck leading to a triangular head. Scarred, scaly gray skin. The eye was squeezed shut.
The sun was well over the horizon now. A big underwater creature like this would live in deep, dark water, Bonnie thought. Probably it wouldn’t like the light. She went back to the sheriff.
“I wonder if you could cover it up,” she suggested.
Sherburne grunted thoughtfully at his phone. “That might help keep these rubberneckers moving, yeah.”
“Hey Eric!” a man yelled. Bonnie recognized Mark from the morning news, with a camera man huffing along behind him. Sherburne turned away from her.
After a few more minutes of looking, Bonnie couldn’t think what else to do, so she headed home. In her kitchen she sipped coffee, turned on the radio, and read messages from friends. Everyone was talking about the thing on the beach, circulating old legends about a giant water-dwelling panther, a fire-breathing snake, Nessie in Scotland and Bessie in Lake Erie.
The morning show featured an expert in marine biology. Unprecedented, the expert said. An amazing specimen. Then she explained that, when whales, for example, stranded themselves like this, usually they were already very sick.
Bonnie clicked the radio off. Lake lizard or water panther—it didn’t matter. The creature was dying. Out of its element, sick and alone.
She poked around in her freezer. Cookies.
A couple hours later she pulled up by the shore with a big thermos and a basket in the backseat. People were pausing on the walking path to stare, but there wasn’t much to see—just a large white tent, covering the thing.
Bonnie recognized a couple people from the county, but mostly she saw unfamiliar people wearing University lanyards, grad students, maybe. A boy—no, a young man in a faded SeaWorld tee shirt was seated by the tent door, staring at a laptop. Bonnie skirted the tent, and quietly slipped through the safety door on the other side.
Inside the tent, diffuse light surrounded the immense body. Someone was carefully, systematically taking pictures of the creature’s flippers; a few more university people were talking or tapping at phones. Logistics, research, planning. A hushed bustle of human activity.
“Coffee, finally, thanks,” said a big blustery-looking woman, short-haired, maybe in her fifties. Dr. Lanna Sonberg, Limnology, her ID said. “I’ll take that. We’re gonna have a long day here. Lots of people coming up to see this thing.”
Bonnie relinquished her thermos and cookies. “Could you tell me—what will happen to it?”
Dr. Sonberg leaned back, crossed her arms over her ample belly, and expounded with professorial enthusiasm. “This animal is built to live in water, so out here in the air, it’s being crushed under its own weight. Too bad we can’t save it, but it’s just barely alive now. Of course it’s a fascinating find, in fresh water . . .” She went on a while, all the ways it was fascinating, scientifically. “But in hot weather, that corpse is gonna rot fast—beached whales even explode sometimes. So we’ll have to find a refrigerated warehouse to store it a while.”
“Oh,” Bonnie said. “Thank you.”
As Dr. Sonberg headed off, Bonnie turned back to the beast. The leviathan, she thought.
She moved toward its head and looked, timidly, feeling very small and frail as she crouched next to the enormous beast. It was too weak to be dangerous, or she hoped so, anyway. Lightly she touched the gray cheek. Its skin felt sunken and sticky, the scales loose and flaking. Its eye trembled open. Big and dark like a chestnut, flat and glazed. She thought about Elmer, who loved hiking and camping, lying so still among the quiet whirrings of machines. Outside that shaded room nurses rushed and alarms beeped, but inside there was nothing to do—nothing for Bonnie to do but watch and remember and wait.
A shallow, stertorous breath sighed forth. The eye twitched toward her. She looked at that eye and thought about deep water, timelessness and weightlessness. As the beast lay dying Bonnie thought about the sea.