Call Me Ishmael

I was drifting, low blood sugar, the air like soup. I hadn’t eaten all day, or maybe I had—I don’t remember anymore. Walking through this supermarket in Japan, one of those blindingly clean ones with neon light and weird elevator music playing overhead, and it was so cold. So cold. Fish eyes staring at me from slabs of ice.

And then there it was. Whale. Raw flesh like wet velvet, whispering at me from behind cellophane. I stared at it the way you stare at someone you’ve seen in a dream before. Wrong and perfect at the same time. I bought it like buying a secret, fed some yen into the machine, heard it beep, and just like that, the small pieces of a slaughtered giant were mine.

Back at home the silence was loud. I didn’t cook it. Just opened the package, dropped the slices onto shredded carrots and radish, squeezed a lemon wedge like a little prayer, and ate them with metal chopsticks. They tasted like horse. Like blood and memory. Like something I wasn’t supposed to taste.

I thought about the whales, sure. Thought about the documentaries and the guilt people wear like expensive jackets. But mostly I thought: when else? When else would I ever get to know this feeling, this very specific wrongness melting on my tongue? I ate the whole thing slowly, like a ritual, like a dare, and when it was done I just sat there with the low hum of the fridge and my own breath rising and falling like I was learning how to breathe for the first time.

There’s something in my gut now, not quite guilt, not quite satisfaction. Something older. Animal. Like I remembered something I shouldn’t have. Next time I want to eat dolphin. I don’t know why exactly. Maybe to feel worse, maybe to feel better, maybe just to feel anything at all. It’s not about taste anymore. It’s about going somewhere I can’t come back from.