Magical realism

from trevor’s encyclopedia of beauty in the plain, genius in the simple, wonder in the ordinary and courage in the human

Hilcias sat beside the Atlantic Ocean at Kiawah Island in South Carolina.

A gigantic tooth washed up with the waves onto the shore.

He was astonished.

The tooth was a sperm whale's tooth, of this he was sure.

The sperm whale was his favorite whale.

The first picture he’d ever drawn of a whale was a crayon sketch of the shape of a sperm whale.

This was before he’d learned that the brightness of a light bulb is measured by a lumen, which is simply the light one cup of spermaceti oil from a sperm whale’s head gives off within a candle.

This was before he’d memorized every fact about sperm whales in his Princeton Field Guide about whales.

He picked up the tooth with both of his hands.

It was a foot long.

It was shaped like a cone.

"This came from the lower jaw of a sperm whale," he thought, "Because they don't have teeth in their upper jaws, only slots that the teeth from the lower jaws fit into.

If I sliced the tooth in half, it would show the age of the whale like the rings of a trunk show the age of a tree.”

He gently laid the tooth beside him on the sand.

Then a conch shell washed up onto the shore.

"Wow. What a wonderful shell,” he thought. 

“Look at its shape and color.”

The shape was a common shape in nature, formed by graphing the numbers 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and so on, the Fibonacci numbers, a special shape that appears in geometry, architecture, art, music and literature.

“Some people call that shape ‘God’s blueprint,’” he thought, “Because it seems to be the plan from which God creates the world.”

Its color was a common color in nature, too.

It was three shades of yellow.

Its spine was the brilliant yellow of the sun that rose over the ocean every morning.

Its siphonal canal was the quiet yellow of the corn he and his abuelo shucked in summer.

Its aperture was the deep yellow of sunflowers in a field.

He picked up the shell with both of his hands.

He raised it to his tiny ear.

Once, someone had told him that if you hold a conch shell to your ear, you can hear the ocean inside of it.

"I wonder if it's true?” he thought.

"If it is, I can take it back to our bus and bring the ocean and the great whales with me.”

He expected to hear only the ocean.

Boy, was he surprised.

The sound he heard inside the shell wasn’t only of breaking waves and rolling tides.

He heard a song.

It was the most beautiful song he had ever heard in his life.

He closed his eyes and saw the notes dancing in front of him.

“I understand,” he thought.

I understand!”

The whale sang to him in his own language, with his own whistles!

They were the notes that made up his whole life, all that he whistled to the world but that the world couldn’t, or wouldn’t, understand.

A tear rolled down his cheek and splashed into the salt water.

Everything inside him poured out onto the wet sand and washed away into the vast reaches of the deep, blue sea.

“I hear you!

I understand you!” he whistled into the shell.

To his great surprise, he received a response.

“I hear you!

I understand you, too!

There’s a story we hear along our migratory routes,”sang the sperm whale, “About a boy on land who can sing our songs and understand our language, a boy who will be with us.

You are that boy, Hilcias. 

You are that boy.”