Whalefall (Draft #1)

Heidi cuts the whale's stomach wide open. Her blade sinks into its skin, ripe as a plum, and the sweet stench of rot fills the air as viscera spills onto the ground. She cuts the meat with surgeon's precision. Hidden under a thick blubber, tender fascia pops under the slightest pressure; deforming, stretching and releasing more juices that paint her hands scarlet.

The whale was a giant. Its carcass spread across the coastline like a monument, crowded by seagulls and other small birds, trying to penetrate the thick outer layer, grey and smooth like stones on this beach. Larize watched one of the seagulls try to peck its eye, hungry and hopeless to suck out the gooey contents. While Heidi did the dirty work, she lit up a cigarette and walked around aimlessly, circling the bleached bones scattered all around them. Everything was grey here: muddy water, clouded sky, dried seaweed, broken seashells and dead whale’s skin. The only bright colors were white from the bones and red from the creature’s innards, filling up more and more space as Heidi continued to cut through the fat and muscle. Once she reached the lower part of its stomach, the intestine unraveled like a ribbon, dropping on the ground with loud, wet plop. Larize twitched.

It's not like she hasn't seen a pile of guts before. It was quite common here, actually. So common that she became accustomed to daily sightings of charred corpses, rotting flesh and dismembered limbs. Yet this whale, somehow, was different. She wanted to call it uncanny, but this too was an odd thing to say. Plenty of things were uncanny. Monsters and beasts and men and who knows what else playing mind tricks and hunting you down for sports. This was just a whale corpse. Gross, foul-smelling, rotting corpse. And even so, the seagulls seemed to enjoy it.

Larize: [Remind me, why did we decide gutting a dead whale was a good idea?]

Heidi: Because that’s the last thing we haven’t tried yet after being stranded here for a week. Not like we have another option.

The smoke seeped slowly through Larize’s exposed teeth. She rubbed her tired eyes, sighing. She was getting sick of the sand piling up in her boots, the dampness of her clothes, and the cold. She pulled Heidi's jacket tighter, her shoulders stiff as she kicked pebbles around. There was nothing but a broken lighthouse and a village a few miles away, overgrown with yellow grass and lichen, old paint peeling from its surface. The lighthouse's lantern was smashed. They found no Doors here, nor any trace of recent human activity. The server was abandoned for a while, some textures glitched, broken pixels found here and there if you looked close enough. No any kind of tech either. They were stuck in the middle of nowhere, again.

Larize: [Do you think this is another one of those batshit psychological puzzles that will make us confront our darkest trauma and teach us a very important life lesson in the end? And then the whole thing turns out to be a fever dream and we wake up at Crossroads in cold sweat and say wow holy shit what a fucking dream that was?]

Heidi: Well, the rot stench seems pretty real to me. Also, isn’t it all just one big fever dream at this point? I think we should be used to insane things like this already.

Larize: [Ik right.]

Larize: [I bet this fucking whale will stand on its tail, put on a little bow tie and top hat and sing us old testament psalms while spreading its bowels like lil angel wings. In the accompaniment of clams with googly eyes as backing vocals, of course.]

Heidi snorted so hard she almost slipped on the intestine. She tried to spread as much of it on the ground as possible, bending over and dragging the bowels out as far as she could. She was covered in blood by this point, bottoms of her pants and elbows being completely soaked, bits of viscera here and there on her sweater. Even her glasses got stained. Larize suddenly felt more interested in the whole thing, making a long smoke inhale.

Larize: [You know, you should bend over more.]
Larize: [To get a better grip, of course.]

Heidi straightened her back and turned to Larize, hand on her hip, eyebrow raised.

Heidi: Oh? Didn’t know you are a whaling expert.

Larize: [Of course I am. I'm an expert of all things that involve dykes bending over and being covered in blood.]

Heidi: Mhm. I can see how helpful your insightful knowledge on this topic is right now.

Larize: [Hey, don’t come at me. All of our equipment got fucked in the prev server, so I am in fact quite useless right now.]

Larize: [I mean I can probably still trigger a breach, but this place seems unstable enough on its own. I don’t want to risk getting fried in here.]

Larize: [Like, if I was to disintegrate into pixels, I’d at least choose a cooler place for it.]

Larize: [This is just boring.]