Whalesong

It almost makes her crash when the song bursts upon her all at once—she doesn’t know how she knows its a whalesong but she does—as it keens and lists, sorrowful and sick, like a misshapen clarinet turned up in the speakers, the notes are outstretched hands, flailing out to find something.

A girl on the sharp edge of a breakup finds herself driving when she hears a song, a whalesong, singing in her head. It can’t be real, and it definitely couldn’t still be alive.

Read if you like: wondering how you’re going to get through this thing, Björk, that scene in a comic where they go past a pod of ghost whales and you’re like ‘wait what now’.

Read for free in Issue 38 of Deadlands, April 2025. (Thanks to E. Catherine Tobler for editing, Annika Barranti Klein for proofreading.)

• Recommended by Ash Vale in their newsletter: “This story was gorgeous and so heartbreaking. It’s all about how grief affects us, and how grief can also be uniting if we let ourselves be open to it, even when it comes from unusual or even scary sources.”
• Reviewed in Locus, July 2025 by Paula Guran: “I found it comforting. That’s all you need to know.”

Cover image of Deadlands 38, “A Furious Wind (The Plight of the Passenger Pigeon) by Jenn Joslin.