'The Fluke' By Eileen Frankel Tomarchio

 

She does pretty well on balmy days in February, March. The flukes. Like her. Winter-weary Manhattanites down the shore for a summer taste always stop at her impromptu boardwalk venue. They smile over her painted clamshell necklaces displayed on faded beach towels. They’re quick to pay because they pity her. She in her tattered Save the Whales t-shirt and peasant skirt, sitting on a cat litter tub. Her aged yet ageless face.

 

Some of them linger when she says she was born over three hundred years ago, in 1717. When she offers her life story, they look trapped and scared, but also mesmerized. Left a nobody’s babe on the steps of the Friends Almshouse in Philadelphia, raised by a Quaker tavern-keeper who re-settled here at the Western Ocean with transplanted New Bedforders. A young woman unable to keep well the virtues of silence and stillness. A regular on the whale hunts, as skilled with the harping iron as any man.

 

Fewer still hang around to hear her tell of how she fell asleep in her dory while a-fishing in the sea one day. How when she awoke and paddled ashore, she found herself in this alien place, three centuries gone. No cause, no answer.

 

The fluke day done, she packs up and goes home to the in-law suite she rents from a kind librarian at the local historical society. Her earnings aren’t what she gets cleaning houses, schools, and offices, but dearer somehow. People listened. Sometimes the librarian invites her into her warm TV room where they binge on pizza and Outlander. The librarian doesn’t pity her at all.

 

When she goes to bed, she dreams of the poor beasts she once speared, towed, and flenched. Dreams she’s inside the belly of one of them, waiting to be spat out.