WHILE MINING A WHALEFALL.

          A Mechanical Whalefall was a potential trap which geologists believed may have contained precious metals, electric current, or recyclable nutrients. The traditional methods of Whalefall prospecting involved combing through the countryside, often through creek beds and along ridgelines and hilltops, often on hands and knees looking for signs of breaching in the outcrop. Visible surface features such as oil seeps, lobtailing, and pockmarks (underground craters caused by escaping organisms) provided basic evidence of a Whalefall (be it shallow or deep in the Hereafter). 
          Mining a Mechanical Whalefall was an expensive, high-risk operation and consisted of digging tunnels or shafts into the afterlife to reach buried carcasses and deposits. Many Whalefalls were buoyant and had to be interred within a structural (e.g. Anticline, fault block) or stratigraphic generator to harness their current. When the available carcass suffered from magnetic fracturing, the remains were occasionally partnered with other forms of power, such as the line shaft, subsoil mill, and rotary mill. 
          Though various signs of carcass electricity had been evident in soil strata for thousands of years, it wasn’t until Midwest Amphitrite when certain isolated and rural communities were thought to spread along fissures in the reflectional faultline looking for these specific areas to settle. It is possible that these communities specialized to the subterranean current could also be found on both sides of the afterlife.  However, precisely how they could reorient, realign, and resettle remains an issue of unclear consequence and symmetry.

          Here, in this place given to us, we were digging for prayers in the pit of each pulse.           We lived in an abyssal town, dreamed of a sky of faint engravings on hammerbeams.  We were homesick and hollowed out.  We had a gray ceiling spilled above our heads and still more threats waiting below.           How many whalefalls had we forgotten now? They waded there in place, gears and levers hung in their ribcages, firehoses held in their throats. Sacrificed like electric conductors, I knew their breaths could blackout the whole town.    
          Jillison said if we walked slow enough, we might keep afloat to find one of our own.           Day and night, each one divided by recycled minerals.  We wore novocaine masks over our eyes and mouths.  Devoid of organic material, we were unable to tell what was a collapse and what was a curtain call. We watched them swimming toward the oldest stage, an entire ecosystem of decomposition.           Prospectors.  Sleeper sharks.  Pickmen. Mechanical arthropods. Drillers.  Sulfophilic bacteria.  A framework of full surface envy.           And if the scaffolding ever stopped to say our names, I wasn’t too shy to admit we would act just the same.           We dug to learn the differences between density and death and dirt.           Fog tugged at our ankles, outlines of oxygen dressed each step.  Jillison said not to believe in intent, there was delicate, and then there was the debris that would develop us.           Gemstones and rock salt and granite and clay.  An orebody to abandon what we knew. We took a crosscut to leave it there, looked for a crawl way toward a whalefall to lose.   
          Yes, there was an opera of nervousness the closer we got to it.           Sunken.  Too cold to prop up the sky.  Never mind the timing. We took her home on a boat.  Each of her severed fingers turned into a different feature of the body.           A dorsal fin, a baleen plate, a flipper, a fluke, and so forth.

          At the edges of another carcass, we excavated scars and called them our cave to mine.
          It was how we came to strike solid ground, incinerating a disposal site until it was just splinters and shale, until the aluminum cans and scrap metals were splayed and spread for hundreds of yards around.
          We soon would call it our Summer of Carcass.  We used shadow tools to sharpen away a silver kind of heat.  We scattered snakeskins in a search for spores and seeds.           Repercussions were crevassing, released to start the cycle over.  Jillison showed me when and then she left me to separate saline from scaffolding.             She was out of sight of our town for thirteen days, trapped on a conveyor belt of surrendering things.           Grain, salt, coal, ore, sand, overburden.           Her fires were set and I wasn’t going near there alone.  I dug until I had a handful of red eyes and run over lungs, I shoveled until I had more empty minerals to mistake than to retain.           One breath was like building over an unburied sun.  Avoidance wasn’t going to work and certainly not in the span of a second week.          Another coal halo to hold the clouds in place.  A slipstream spread over a steep-dip seam. A moat full of marrow removed. One day of only us. I understood them now, the scenes of her last resort rehearsal.
          My eyes were swimming between set designs and shallow water.  I could feel my face sinking into its pockets, the winces and incisions chiseling against my skin.           Tissue and topsoil thinned in the night. I slept in a vein of of almost vertical remains. Even my bedspread was soaking wet (more or less water), mostly withering.
          That was where it was. It wasn’t meant to be the same.
          I found our whalefall, collapsed flat as a landfill, I followed fault lines and flood lights where flowing blood should have been.          Pure dusk underground. I was tearing a path out of a general pulse, walking past another wall of invasive organisms and promises stripped from point and purpose.  It was all I could do to stay on the slow side of the skeleton, to sever an instinct and make sense of where it ends.           Saline split from scaffolding and I was stubborn enough to search for her still.  I had to stop and breathe.  If Jillison trusted us to leave silver linings alone, I would listen for her whisper to know.           If ever I thought our whalefall was waking back up, it would only become an echo of us.