Geometric whale design beside a rose forearm tattoo

The whale came up through the ice of the Kessel Basin on the ninth day of the thaw, and nobody believed Mother when she said its skin was folded from light. She had been sketching the water for the survey office with pencil and blue ink, the way Grandfather taught her, and when the surface split she swore the creature was built from triangles, each one a small sail catching the lamps. By evening she had filled four sheets, dotted shading down the flank where the pressure lines ran, fine hatching along the fins like rigging on a schooner.

The station engineer, Okonkwo, laughed until he saw the lower panel. Mother had drawn the deep water as a black triangle sprinkled with white points, and every point sat where the observatory's star charts put the old constellations. She said the whale had not come up from the basin at all. It had come down from the sky, following the seams between the stars the way a fish follows a current, and it was only resting in our water until the cold lifted.

I wanted to believe her, and I still half do. On the last night of the survey the blue patches on the whale's back began to glow faintly under the lamp, the same colour as the ink in her pen. Mother pressed one of the sheets flat against the window and said, very quietly, that it was time to let it go. We carried the drawings down to the hatch together and watched the wet ink catch the starlight. By morning the whale had left the basin, and the sheets were blank.

Write when the thaw ends. Tell me whether the ice still has its triangles.

Your sister, Lira