<div class="floatleft">(http://slodive.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/dreadlock-hairstyles/red-dreads.jpg)</div><strong>Name:</strong>Eva Bellamy (https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=250173.msg12432737#msg12432737)<br/><strong>City | Date | Time:</strong>A remote region of the Northern California Coast | June 2, 2017 | 10:00 am<br/><strong>Tagging:</strong>Nadia De Lucchi (https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=250173.msg12410206#msg12410206)<br/><strong>Content:</strong><em>A Tragedy, and a Meeting</em><br/><hr/><br/>Teardrops in the ocean.  So many metaphors, poetic and literary, for the futility of them all.  And yet she wept them anyway, silent streams of useless tears wending their way over pale, pink-blotched cheeks, falling from her trembling chin to disappear into the wet sands where she knelt.<br/><br/>Where else could all this pain go?<br/><br/>Eva had been some four miles away when she felt the first, far distant rumblings of his suffering.  The sun had been up some for some hours already, burning away the fog, but she still lay beneath the driftwood lean-to that served as all the shade and shelter she needed these nights.  The gentle, timeless roar of the ocean was the music of her days now, and she was content to listen to the sea gulls bickering overhead, or watch the nearby colony of sea otters as they played along the rocky crags of the shoreline.  One of the females had just given birth, and Eva had thrilled to the touch of its velvet-soft fur, cradling its tiny, precious body to hers for some sweet moments before returning the pup to her dam.  These were the days as Eva spent them now, timeless and contented.  She might not see another man or woman for days at a time, and Eva was fine with this.  She had found her solitary peace in the life and death and life all over again, sheltered along the sea she loved.<br/><br/>Until now.<br/><br/>It had begun as a low, visceral ache in her gut, wending its way up her spine, wrapping around her rib cage with an insidiously growing pressure.  Despair and fear licked hotly at the edges of her mind, as if it were flame looking to ignite the tinder of her panic.  She twisted swiftly to her knees, green eyes peering down the craggy length of shore, in the direction from where the agonizing miasma was borne.  In an instant her tennis-shoe clad feet were beneath her, catapulting her up and away.<br/><br/>She ran.  No matter the breath wrung from her lungs with every stumbling step, Eva sprinted along the shoreline.  Desperation flung her forward, straight into the terrifying maelstrom ahead, heedless of rock or crag in her desperation.  She fell - God, she knew not how many times, the knees of her jeans torn and bloodied as the palms of her hands.  But that didn't matter either, any more than the spiraling, white hot pain in her chest, intensifying with every faltering step; or the breaths she could barely sip past her lips into burning lungs.<br/><br/>She knew what she would find there on that beach, long before she ever arrived.  He was a young humpback whale, his enormous thirty-foot body trapped helplessly on the sands and rocks.  So breathtakingly graceful in the waters of Mother Sea, he was all but paralyzed in this cruel, barren world above the waters.  Terrified and in such pain, without the least notion how he managed to strand himself from his pod and Mother Sea, the weight of his own body was crushing the very breath from him.  He could not even call to his family through the thin, biting air that surrounded him.<br/><br/>Though a soft, strangled cry escaped at the sight of him, Eva did not speak.  Human sounds could not bring him any peace, and she simply hadn't the breath to spare.  Her steps suddenly leaden, Eva staggered to his side, falling to her knees in the shallow, foaming waters of the shoreline.  She draped her slender body against his side, fingers and palms outspread as she rested against his belly.  The salt of his skin stung the gashes along her hands horribly, but Eva would not leave his side.  She dare not call for his pod either - they would likely only beach themselves in their desperation to save the young whale anyway.<br/><br/>With an agonized moan, her forehead fell forward against his skin as she drew his pain and fear into her own body, siphoning it away like the poison from a snake bite in one of those old, black and white Westerns.  This however -<em>this</em>was all too real, the nauseating, suffocating whirlpool of the whale's dying dragging her beneath the darkest waters, drowning her hopes.  Would it take hours then?  Days even, for him to pass?  Eva could not begin to guess, her only prayer that her frail, merely mortal body would not fail him before that moment...