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The Magic Word photo

And then somebody said the magic word. Whale. It echoed and bobbed up and down the beach, and into the dunes, where I was relieving Victoria of her secrets.

‘Whale,’ she hummed, ‘whale..’

‘Another false alarm, for sure,’ I told her, nuzzling previously uncharted waters. 

‘No. Go, please, check.

So I did. And there they were, a quarter mile out, a pod of pilot whales. We’d spent three weeks at the ocean, waiting for a sighting. Which wasn’t long, compared to the fourteen weeks I’d waited, before she invited me to put my fingers inside her underwear. The whales moved so graciously, like a freight train. The younger ones to the rear, grandstanding for the camera flashes. I’d never witnessed anything so beautiful, and doubted if I ever would again

‘And?’ said Victoria, clipping her bra, ‘and?’

‘Like I said, false alarm.’ And I bowed my head and returned to the sandy crevices.

image: Patrick Casey


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