3B

Wednesday, September 4, 2019 // The Statement 
 
3B

majority of the evening.
Before that night, you’d never con-
sidered yourself anything other than 
straight. Sure, you could recognize when 
other guys were objectively attractive, but 
your main preoccupation was girls. Spe-
cifically, you dwelled on your inability 
to hook up with them, but the focus was 
girls, nonetheless. As you got drunk that 
night on cheap Scotch from a flask tucked 
into your tuxedo, your eyes sought Fra-
ser more frequently than any other model 
in the show. His gaze caught yours once 
while he was doing the final walk with the 
entire brigade of designers, models and 
event coordinators. His dark red hair and 
blue eyes were both dangerous and invit-
ing, a dare you weren’t sure you could fol-
low through on.
That night was the first and last time 
you kissed him. It was half a joke, and half 
serious, as his girlfriend Anna was egging 
him on to lean in and do it after another 
round of tequila shots at the Union bar’s 
after-party. You’d managed to strike up 
an alcohol-fueled conversation with him 
after Callum decided he’d had enough of 
the “posh bastards” and headed back to 
his dorm.
Fraser, his eyes half-closed, and his 
shirt half-unbuttoned and inexplica-
bly damp, slung his arm around you and 
declared you his new best friend. He 
grabbed your phone and put his number 
in it.
The first time you called that number 
was the day of his disappearance.

DAY THIRTEEN
It’s five in the morning, and you’ve 

woken up with a racing heart and a cold 
sweat, concentrated around your knees 
and torso. Euan’s hulking silhouette 
shifts in the bed across from yours, his 
breath even and mind apparently bliss-
fully unconscious. Your sweat clinging to 
your skin in small beads, you sit up, wip-
ing the moisture from your body with a 
dry section of your sheets.
You dreamed Fraser was back, only you 
were the only one to know he’d returned. 
He led you to the pier by the crumbling 
cathedral and kissed you again, this 
time slowly, not at all joking or making a 
show of it. The reflection of the Northern 
Lights played on the surface of the ocean, 
calmer than you’d ever seen it before. 
Only, when you drew back to look at Fra-
ser, he’d vanished, and you were alone 
again in the dark.
Fighting the raging wind, you leave 
the walled enclosure of St. Salvatore’s 
and walk down The Scores, the narrow 
lane separating the town’s cliffs from the 
shores of the North Sea. The water’s so icy 
there’s no classic ocean breeze, no salty 
brine, only the scent of that damned wind, 
roaring down on the exposed, chapped 
skin of your face.
The sun won’t come up for another 
couple hours, but the sky is clear, a half-
moon shedding light on the earth, turning 
everything a barely-visible midnight blue. 
You take the road as far as it will go, end-
ing at the Old Course on the outskirts of 
town.
You hoist your legs over the thick metal 
fence that encloses the world’s first golf 
course. Spongy and soft, the grass is 
shorn down to millimeters here. Undu-

lating mounds and dips in the earth make 
you believe, briefly, that you’re on the 
surface of another planet. The wind picks 
up here, uninterrupted by cliffs or by old 
stone buildings.
When you reach West Sands, you gag 
on the air. It smells like brackish water 
and death. The beach stretches out for 
hundreds of meters — your shoes scarcely 
make an imprint in the flat, kelp-ridden, 
dense sand. It still feels unearthly here, 
and you begin to think this is what the 
surface of the moon must be like.
The tide’s out, and, close to the retreat-
ing waves you spot a black, boundless 
mound, backlit by the moonlight. You run 
to it.
“Fraser!” you scream. “Fraser, is that 
you?”
The closer you get, the larger the 
mound looms. You stop short of the fig-
ure before you, still and silent on the 
sand. Hands trembling, you pull out your 
phone, switching on the flashlight. You 
point it at the mystery heap. Your brain 
doesn’t register what you’re seeing for 
several seconds.
Horizontal whitish ridges elongate the 
creature. You’re looking at a belly, bloated 
and half your height. The skin turns dark 
grey when you move the light up, scanning 
the outline of whatever this is. When you 
find the mouth, massive bristles line the 
top jaw.
It’s a dead minke whale, and, from the 
smell of it, it isn’t a fresh one. A tongue, 
massive and pink, lies on the sand fall-
ing from the whale’s gaping mouth. The 
tongue’s as large as your leg.
Horror floods your throat, and you 

retch on the beach, steps from the corpse.

DAY THIRTY-EIGHT
A local found Fraser this morning. 
Parallel to the pier, the tide of East Sands 
washed up his remains on the jagged 
rocks, where they were sniffed out by a 
curious dog. Preliminary reports are say-
ing it was an accidental drowning, ruling 
out foul play and suicide.
You head to the pier, that formidable 
jutting structure, stretching its arms to 
greet the water, a sheer drop down to slick 
rocks and hidden currents if the gusts 
hurl you over. No one else is out here, cau-
tious against a festering spring storm and 
discouraged by the police who’d already 
transported the body elsewhere. At the 
end of the pier, sky and sea merge into one 
long grey haze, and each bellows out its 
protests, beating its own chest.
You collapse at the pier’s edge, your 
mind returning to your dream, when Fra-
ser held your face and kissed you in this 
very location. You knew you’d loved him 
then, and the loss claws at your chest. 
A white wave, brimming with greyish-
brown foam, kisses your fingertips, still 
clamped to the slick slabs of stone.
You look to the West Sands, the sprawl-
ing expanse of cold beach. You recall the 
whale that washed up there, some weeks 
ago, bloated and slick with decomposi-
tion. Students were warned not to go close 
to the corpse; it was going to explode. Its 
eyes had been pecked out by the gulls. 
Hours ago, it was Fraser who was discov-
ered, pale and swollen, on the rocks. You 
wonder whether his eyes were gone too.

ILLUSTRATION BY SHERRY CHEN

