Poached Egg on Toast Read Online Free

skin was black and sleek, and Clayton knew before he stood beside it that it was a sperm. He’d heard of whales stranding, but had never seen such a thing; all his memory could supply was that they sometimes came in in large numbers. He looked up and down the beach and out into the waves, but this was the only whale to be seen. It gave a sudden shudder, and slammed its flukes against the sand. As the reverberation went through Clayton’s body, he jumped three feet back, knowing it was alive. An eye, a purplish-dark eye as big as a grapefruit, opened and looked straight at Clayton. Clayton felt an immense surge of pity for the creature and was not afraid. The whale had come in to die on Clayton’s land.
    He did not know what to do, whether he should go to get Zeta or get help. But how could he help? It was useless to think that anyone could get this old whale back into the water. The sea had begun to ebb, and the huge body had already made a deep impression in the sand. And the whale itself seemed to be ebbing. Clayton put his hand on the side of the whale’s head and wondered at the feel of it. The great eye closed, and the blowhole high up on the left released a soft moan of air. For a long time, Clayton stood with his hand on the whale. At times, it made clicking sounds. After long intervals, it released air from its lungs and snapped its blowhole shut with a soft sucking sound.
    Clayton took off his plaid jacket and waded into the water in trousers and boots, the icy water numbing his legs. He soaked the jacket through and brought it back to the whale and tried to spread it along part of the whale’s head and back. It was like putting a postage stamp on a boxcar but Clayton somehow felt, rather than knew, that the whale was more comfortable because of it. The narrow lower jaw had flattened into the sand, and there were small pools of water around its astonishing white mouth. The whale had begun to bleed, and the blood was trickling into these little pools. The sky was almost completely dark.
    Clayton removed the jacket and soaked it in the sea again, bringing it back to the whale. Although for the rest of his life he would never know how he did it, he felt himself slipping and sliding and climbing up onto the massive rippled back. The whale made no sound. Clayton stretched his length out over the huge long back, and lay his head near the blowhole. A wide whoosh of humid warm air blew back strands of Clayton’s grey hair. Clayton put his face down, and mourned.
    The house was in darkness when he returned. He was cold and soaked and bloody, and he stripped in the kitchen and washed there, at the sink. He rolled up his clothes and left them by the door. Tomorrow, he would phone his neighbours, and they would try to bury or burn the remains.
    And if hundreds of years from now, the earth was pushed back, churned up, would anything be found? Of the whale, of him, of Zeta? Would there be no rag, no bone, no trace of themselves?
    “Zeta,” he called softly through the bedroom door. “Zeta, you awake?”
    No answer.
    “Zeta, I’m back.”
    “I know,” she said. “You’ve been upset, haven’t you.” She lifted the covers for him and he slid into bed beside her, in the dark.

An August Wind
    An August wind had lashed the coast for three days; not a single blue-and-white fishing boat had been seen on the horizon throughout that time.
    A great white shark, weighing a ton, had drowned seven miles out in the cod nets four days before, and had been hauled to Covehead where its seventeen-foot length now hung by its tail from a hoist in the harbour so that people could ogle and touch, and take photographs. The wide teeth had been hacked from it, to be sold, and its mouth, gaping and slack, dragged the ground while fishermen stood, arms folded, impatient to get back to their nets, but glad of the diversion, which relieved the monotony of their idleness, their enforced obedience to the wind.
    The sun had shone through three