Humpback whales

Above, the light breaks apart into strands. Further down, it no longer reaches. She moves slowly, as if crossing a room where someone is sleeping. Dozens of metric tons of patience, focused on a single gap: the one that separates her from him. She does not touch him. It doesn’t need to. The calculation takes place in the water, in the currents it breaks before they reach him. He doesn’t yet know the weight of the depths. He knows that an immense flank is passing overhead, and that the darkness on that side remains at a distance. Nothing can be heard on the screen. There is only this slowness—the kind you adopt when another’s life depends on the way you move.