Jonah Series, in full

Jonah, Swallowed

When I was a prophet, I wanted to be a sailor. When I was a sailor, I was sick on the rails all the time. Heaving out at the sea, I thought about the tightrope walker from the circus back home, how she glided into the void with her arms outstretched. I wanted to say it was like that, that running away from God was something graceful and calculated. No one ever tells you how much the wire shakes.

God bullied up the water, sent a storm to drag me back. Too seasick to stand, I tied myself upright to the mast, dug my fingernails into the wood. John tore me off, said, You ain’t no sail, said, You gonna sink us all with those sins, boy. My boots were heavy with rain. I could have emptied them, but the men came fast and threw me over the rails. I thought I could find the wire and stick the landing, but there was nothing to hold onto. My hands hit the water, and everything went cold. When I sank under the ship, I could see her giant eye.

My whale, she saved me, like a good wife. She made me part of her body. She hides me under her skin, while he waits out there, hungry.

Jonah, Day 6

For days, Jonah has been talking to himself. Not much else to do inside a whale. He looks like a high school boy nerving up to ask some girl out, pacing the belly, wiping his palms against his thighs. He replays the same scene over and over, how he took her hand and called her by her real name—Lily, not Hattie the Highwire Girl. But she didn’t call him Jonah. Prophet boy, she said. Don’t touch me, prophet boy. Turns out tightrope walking is a one-man act. No room for two in the air.

Jonah had thought God was guiding him to Lily, that her sequin-studded hair and steady legs were his reward for all his prophet wanderings. When she turned away, he cut down her rope and tied it round his wrists and ankles. See this, God? I won’t move ‘til you make her love me. But then the lions got loose and Jonah changed his mind.

Now, he paces the whale, sloshing his boots through the half-digested krill. He can hear the whale’s heart beating loud and slow above him. He knows there are worse places he could be, that God could have struck him on the spot. But that heart, it won’t let him sleep.

Jonah, Day 17

Decided to start decorating. There isn’t much you can do with ribs. God can make a woman out of them, but I’m not like him. There will be no woman. There will only be ribs. Maybe a disco ball. Something to put all these scales to use. Something to reflect the scant light. I just need something to do with my hands. Give me a helm, and I’ll steer. Give me a surgical saw, and I’ll cut out the heart. I’ll make this place a home. A woman would say it needs window treatments. She’d say, You aren’t a decorator just because some whale swallowed you whole and you’re lonely and bored. A home needs window treatments. But there is no woman.

Jonah the Prophet

When God said, Go to Nineveh, I could hear the whale in his voice. I was at the circus, watching the trapeze artist who was to fall that night. God loves the circus freaks, and I guess I did too, until that girl tied her rope around my lungs, hung me thirty feet up and walked over my back. How could he keep asking me to save them after that? Place a cushion here. Speak over his broken rib. Healed, they would stand up with their eyes wide and shiny, like they’d seen the face of Almighty. I hate this part. Falling makes for a better show.

Nineveh was one bad circus. God should have collapsed that tent, caged the people in with the lions. But I knew he wouldn’t do it. I’d prophesy over them, and they would turn back to God, and everyone would eat popcorn and peanuts and nobody would have to be the sad clown that scares all the kids.

God didn’t want to send this whale either. He wanted me to get over my anger, be his little prophet boy again. But when I heard it, the possibility of being swallowed, of hiding from him and his ridiculous plans, I ran straight for the sea.

Jonah’s Whale

She wasn’t hungry when she swallowed him. It was more like the instinct humans have to touch a stingray’s soft body, except she wanted him inside her. She glides slowly through the water, imitating a submarine, those metal whales she’s seen near land, the ones with the men inside. She wants to make a space for him, doesn’t want to jostle him around, the poor wild thing. She can feel his claws growing longer inside her and hear the raw anchovies he bites into. She doesn’t bite, she filters. Only civilized creatures have baleens, she thinks. This man has a row of violence in his mouth. When he’s not chewing the fish, he’s chewing his own flesh: lips, bits of skin around the fingernails. She half-expects him to eat his arm off one of these days, out of boredom, or perhaps out of sadness. She’s seen a lot of limbs lost at sea. Sometimes a tentacle torn from a squid, sometimes a leg bitten off from a sailor. The difference is that a squid has three hearts to make up for the loss, and a man has only one, left somewhere on land.

Jonah, Day 24

Sometimes the whale opens her mouth and strange objects come inside. Yesterday, a red high-heeled shoe. Jonah pretended it was a telephone, pressing his ear to the insole. He prank-called God. Is your refrigerator running? Better send the angels to catch it! He felt like a teenager again, and it was exhilarating and sad. He thought that if God really were a Father he’d be playing catch with him in the backyard right now. He tried playing catch with the shoe, but the heel kept coming down in his palm and it hurt and it’s stupid to play catch by yourself anyway. Jonah sat down in a pile of krill and sulked. He thought about the millions of fathers on land playing catch with their sons and about trees and dirt and all the things that don’t smell like fish. He tried calling God again. He dialed 911, because it was an emergency this time, but nobody answered. Nobody answered the first time either.

Jonah, Day 33

Jonah expects to die today. He’s been keeping track of the days by the light through the blowhole and thirty-three sounds awful to him. He doesn’t know about Jesus yet, but he can feel that thirty-three is a dying number. The whale has been acting strange, too. Her calls are lower and longer than usual, like she’s mourning. He can feel that she’s slowing down. He thinks maybe she’s been separated from her family. He thinks, Isn’t it just like life? A woman eats a man and loses her family and they both go off to die together at the bottom of the sea. Jonah’s become a cynic about love. He’s had too much time to think about Lily, her glittered neck and rope-worn feet. He wonders if he imagined her, if he was lonely enough to do something like that. Not that it matters anymore. Now it’s just him and his whale, and he can’t even talk to her. Sometimes he sings to her, but he isn’t sure she can hear him. And besides, no one wants to listen to their dinner howling away inside them. Jonah lies down to sleep, listening to the thump-thump-thump of her heart. It used to keep him up, that beating, but now it’s like a lullaby, sinking him to sleep.

Jonah dreams that her heart stops beating in the night. He crawls through her ribs to start it up, pummeling his fists against the muscles until she comes back to him. He wakes up in a panic but the beat is still there. He puts his hand to his chest and feels his own heart pumping in rhythm with hers.