Your Whale

Your whale calls. It’s been three weeks. You have to take your children back. Your whale wants to do other things with its time.

Your children don’t like staying in your house. There’s too much land there. You take them to the pool so they’ll be happy, but they never want to get out of the pool.

You should be more firm, but you love watching them swim. They remind you of your whale.





Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s prose can be found in The Fabulist, Joyland, Vestal Review and Gigantic. His short story “Taylor Swift” won the 2015 Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast. He is a member of the non-ranked faculty collective bargaining team at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where he edits the journal Eleven Eleven.

You can see more of Hugh's work in issues 5.2 and 2.4 and 1.1