Nagasaki Boy
by Brian
Yashimoro rounded the corner of the beach and saw a massive sperm whale washed up on shore.
He approached the beast cautiously, taking a circuitous path up the beach and toward the head, which was the size of the city bus that Yashimoro took into town for the market. There was movement in the whale’s dinner-plate sized eye. The whale was alive.
He had never smelled anything like the whale’s fermented rotten fish breath, not even from the piles of rotting whale parts at the processing plant. Whale smelled as bad alive as it did dead, Yashimoro could confirm.
A living whale of this size was worth a small fortune. Soon the fishermen would find out and arrive to claim it. But Yashimoro did not want them to get the whale. He didn’t know what he could do to stop them, but he would think of something.
Yashimoro lived atop the cliff in a one-bedroom house that his father left to him. He had no children of his own. He hadn’t been able to find a wife because of his deformity. He was born with an oversized head and one eye. Doctors gave him a glass eye as a kid but he lost it and could not afford a replacement as an adult. The empty eye did not bother him. Just the others, who laughed and called him “Nagasaki Boy.”