Whales in Minnesota

Sarah Hulyk Maxwell
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My friend says that if you lie on a frozen lake with your ear against the ice, you can hear it shifting way down below. When I ask what it sounds like, she says, “Whales.” We put on the warmest clothes in our suitcases and walk the half-mile in the below-zero air to the closest lake. I remember last year the news reporter indicating “polar vortex” and then announcing a record number of third-degree burns from Minnesotans tossing boiling water not high enough above their heads when the wind chill dropped the temperature to negative sixty degrees. Lying on the ice, I forget what distance is because to be near something is to suggest you can run away from it, and, right now, I feel pushed onto the lake, compacted and dizzy from the white sky and my mouth expels breath as clouds.
People drown every year, driving their trucks onto ice thinned by the sun, unable then to escape. I turn my head, remove my ear, and try to see the bottom, but the ice is frosty and too layered to see anything but an imagined body, rising and scraping the frozen surface, a face squinting to see my face, two hands flat trying to feel my hands flat. A rumbling crack tests the divide between us. My friend shushes me, though I haven’t said a word.

Sarah Hulyk Maxwell lives in Pittsburgh but somehow often finds herself in Minnesota. She has two cats, a husband, and an MFA from Louisiana State University. Her most recent work can be found in Up the Staircase Quarterly and Salamander, and is forthcoming in Red Paint Hill.