The Dolphin

The first dolphin to be anesthetized died on the operating table. An incision hadn’t been made. The procedure went according to plan. It was just the anesthetic.

A tragedy, to find a half-ton mammal that shares cerebral lineages dead from the thing that quiets its mind.

Sergey had never seen a dolphin with his own eyes. He had lived for twenty-five years, all of which were spent in Ukraine. It was never easy. But that’s why he had family.

Until he didn’t. Until he and his mother fled to the West in 2014. Until it was just him and mother. Until it was just him.

Until the war came and he found new family.

And it was walking through a school in Eastern Ukraine, a school that Sergey could have attended, that he came across the picture of the massive dolphin dead on the operating table.

It was the only book caught in the early-spring light that streamed through window frames that lacked glass panes. The high-gloss pages pitched the light into the hallway. It was in that moment that Sergey saw the dolphin.

He moved from the hallway into the classroom. He dropped his guard along with his rifle which fell to his side and hung with the barrel pointed to the ground. The sling grew heavy on his shoulder.

It is an image he’d never seen before. Never thought of before. He had seen so much. Seen the world of the living and the dead. He didn’t sleep more than an hour at a time. He wondered what he was looking at. So strange. So grotesque. Pale grey flesh surrounded by men in aqua-green scrubs and facemasks.

He looked around the classroom more. No bodies. No sign of life. Just a repository of knowledge and memory quickly fading. He knew it’d all get torn down. A rusty stain spilled down from eye level and turned into a dry pool at the base of the chalkboard. No body.

Sergey picked up the book. He read the text as fast as he could.

He picked up on something about the subconscious, breathing, and regulatory systems. That they die when they’re anesthetized. That dolphins die when their subconscious is quieted.

He closed the book. Looked around the room.

“Everything okay?” a fellow soldier asks him in the doorway. Sergey stares ahead.

“I’m fine.”