Fathoms
vivian faith prescott
For Alex and other activist teens living in small Alaskan towns.
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This is a girl among icebergs, on a school trip in the bay of Big Thunder,
when the glacier caught rifle shots from Florida, from Connecticut, from
Virginia, and the ice fractured and calved, came crashing down like a breach-
ing whale. This is a girl who is never far from where rifles are kept in cor-
ners, on bookcases, in closets. Last weekend she went moose hunting and
today, with her iPhone, she filmed a kid in her class, yelling: I’ll shoot up
the school. He’ll do it. He will. The teachers tell her: Be quiet, don’t show
that clip to anyone. He has the right to privacy—the school didn’t expel him.
This is a girl accustomed to the sound of rifle shots. She’s harvested deer
before she even turned sixteen. She’s pounded deer skin drums, ate deer
jerky, smoked and jarred meat, shot a large halibut, even. This is a girl who
rests her head on her desk at school and tries to understand, to fathom, to
witness. She wonders about being alone while not being alone. She listens
for the echolocation, passes a note to another student—Walk out. Speak out.
Do something, this girl. She circles the note through the class like a bubble
net. She knows whales feed in groups, this girl does. And when she decides
to sound, her fluked tail rises, trailing seawater, and she takes the hand of
another girl beside her, and that girl takes another’s hand and another and
another. This is a girl who doesn’t know how long they should stay beneath
the surface, but this is a girl who can fathom depth, a measure of length
beneath her family’s fishing boat. A fathom is six feet down into her cousin’s
fresh grave—his wounds upwelled to drown him. This is a girl who can hold
all of their breaths for as long as it takes. There’s an ancient sea within her
and she’s seen her grandfather measure his halibut skate, a line running the
length of a gravel driveway. This is a girl who rides fathoms in spiral paths,
the evening light on the green sea; a girl who knows the humpback whale
dives a hundred feet down into the dark calm—a girl who still believes a sin-
gle fathom is the span of her outstretched arms.