D. Dina Friedman
Policy for Whales
In the beginning, whales ruled the world. There were no apples, no trees of life or knowledge. No God. Just whales, and a lot of blue and salt. There wasn’t much to rule over, a few fish and whatever grew on the ocean floor that didn’t get eaten by the fish. There were a few outliers—octopi and coral—but the whales and fish paid them no attention. It was a society that valued conformity and had no regard for extra limbs. The prevailing motto was live and let live, unless you had to kill to eat.
Somehow, the world changed. People started to kill octopi and fish, and even coral, though they didn’t eat the coral. People speared whales and wrote great books about whales as symbols for the fall of humanity. But how did people even get there? God created them. God rose out of the slimy mass of salty water and created people, and created apples, and then told the people not to eat the apples. And God created cartoons that people watched in which octopi were the incarnates of evil. God gave people the authority to destroy everything that grew in the whales’ world, though God called this authority free will.
In protest, the whales threw their heavy bodies on the beach, but this was a stupid act of self-destruction that did no good and the whales soon realized it. Then God realized there should be a policy for whales, so God told people to create one. Since then people have been bickering about what this policy should be, but the whales have floated themselves past politics (from which the world policy is derived) into a perpetual state of buoyancy. “Ocean is the opiate of the masses,” they titter to each other using their sonar signals. The whales now know truth, and the whales also know that truth has nothing to do with policy, and that another word derived from policy is police.
D. Dina Friedman is the author of the two young adult novels. Escaping Into the Night (Simon and Schuster, 2006) was recognized as a Notable Book for Older Readers by the Association of Jewish Libraries, and a Best Books for Young Adults nominee by the American Library Association. Playing Dad’s Song (FSG, 2006) was recognized as a Bank Street College of Education Best Book. She is also the author of the poetry chapbook Wolf in the Suitcase (Finishing Line Press 2019). Her work has appeared in Calyx, Common Ground Review, Lilith, Wordpeace, Pinyon, Negative Capability, New Plains Review, Steam Ticket, Bloodroot, Inkwell, and Pacific Poetry, among other journals. Friedman holds an MFA from Lesley University. She lives in Hadley, Mass., and teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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