Junie woke up in the whale, still half-dreaming of the birds, approximately twenty minutes after her mama had put her inside of it.
By the time the McIntyres won the Expedition Lottery, Jakarta, New Orleans, and Manila had already been swallowed by the Big Blue. It was thus known by everyone on the cul-de-sac of Milkweed Street—as well as every other living being—that in a month, the Big Blue was to come for the rest of the Earth.
As for Junie, she was the last to talk to Lucas McIntyre before he left. They lived across the street from each other in a lonely North Carolinian suburb and talked occasionally in class. Lucas had knocked on Junie’s door during breakfast and begged her to take his birds. Thirty minutes later, she was standing on the McIntyres’ muddy driveway, water from the coast licking the bottom of her rain boots.
Mr. McIntyre came out of their peach-colored house with two light backpacks. He threw them into the trunk and leaned against the car, lighting a cigarette.
“Thanks for taking ‘em, Junie,” he said.
Lucas hoisted the birdcage into Junie’s hands. Inside, two beautiful green budgies scuttled back and forth across their shared perch, twittering for food.
“Gizmo likes sunflower seeds,” Lucas said, poking his finger into the top of their cage. “And Pip likes cashews.”
“Lucas,” Mr. McIntyre said, getting into the driver’s seat. “We don’t want to be late.”
Lucas followed, dragging his feet, then seemed to remember that Junie was not coming with him.
“Out of all of us, your mama applied the earliest,” he said. “My dad said Ms. Fajardo should hear back soon.”
Then, Lucas was gone, his dad’s Honda Accord treading carefully on the water creeping into their suburb, and Junie took the chirping avians inside.
One fact to know about Junie is that for the vast majority of her early childhood, she had made it a habit to sleep past the loudest sounds and the most calamitous disasters.
A large part of this peculiar talent was due to her mama, Bernila Fajardo, who knew exactly how to put her to bed. It was a familiar and formulaic process, needing only a gentle pat-pat-pat with the fat part of her palm on Junie’s skin; in seconds, Junie would be rendered soundless, dozing steadily into some saccharine sub-reality.
For that reason, Junie had no recollection of the night after Lucas left, when an animal’s song had awakened Bernila in the middle of an empty dream. The song was a melody of pleasant groans and delightful chirpings, and it lasted approximately nine minutes before it rang out again, considerably louder the second time, shaking the house.
When Junie flipped on her side, fluttering her dainty eyelashes, her mama said, “Matulog ka na, love,” and pat-pat-patted the small of her back.
Junie mumbled, “Are those the birds again, Mama?”
“No, anak. It’s the balyena,” Bernila said. “Do you know what a balyena is, Junie?”
But by then, Junie’s head had tilted back into her pillow, and she was already fast asleep.
After the McIntyres, it was the Rutherfords, then it was the Dengs, then the Garcias and the Mukherjees. They were told to take no clothes, no perishables, and no pets. They were to leave their sinking houses behind, do whatever they wanted with their finances—which would be useless in space, anyway—and bring only their dearest valuables. Julia Deng tried to take her succulent, but she was reportedly detained at the Expedition station for bringing a live specimen, and was herded into another ship without her family.
While one-third of Sesame County’s second-grade class and their families had made it to Mars, Venus, and whatever dwarf planets or inhabitable moons the Expeditioners could colonize, Junie’s mama stood every day at the mailbox, waiting for the mailman. He’d come at 2 p.m. every day, his truck splashing water along the wet curbs, and each time he reached Junie’s house, he’d have nothing to give.
“Maybe tomorrow, Bernila,” he would say. And then the next day, he’d say it again. “Maybe tomorrow.”
After three tomorrows, Junie began to watch her Mama from the porch. The phones and the Internet were finally down in their part of the state. The sea spat up multiple dolphins along the submerged coastal region, and they, in their blissful confusion, had stranded themselves near the central power lines. The empty suburb all looked the same now—indistinguishable white houses with darkened windows slowly being gulped by rising Blue.
When the mailman came, Junie overheard him tell her mother, “We were chosen. Me and my family.”
Bernila clicked her tongue, pursed her mouth firmly. “When are you leaving?”
“Soon as I can get home to my wife. All roads to DC will be blocked come morning.”
Junie kicked away at the small crabs snipping curiously at her toes. Barnacles had begun sticking to the columns of their house, decorating the front door. The air was all saline, so bloated with it that it burned her eyes and nose.
“One more thing,” Junie overheard the mailman say. “Postal service is stopping in many counties. The Expedition says there are no spots left.”
Bernila went stock-still. “They promised.” Pinched, pinched at the fluffy fabric of her bathrobe collar. “I put our names in way before all this . . . even before the first city went under.”
He put a hand on her elbow. “Y’all take care.”
He got back into his truck, his engine sputtering, and he did Bernila Fajardo the kindness of gently accelerating so as to not splash water on her pajama pants. Once the mailman was out of sight, Junie watched her mama stomp her foot and lift her chin to the searing sun.
“Fuck!” Her voice echoed throughout their empty suburb— “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”—skipping across the water, then sinking like a heavy stone.
“Mama?” Junie nudged at her car door until it opened. “What the fuck are we gonna do now?”
Junie’s mama raised her head from where it was flattened against the wheel. “Don’t curse at me, Junie.” There was a bright red splotch imprinted with the wheel’s leather pattern across her forehead. “Where’d you learn that?”
Junie said, “Sorry, Mama.”
Bernila had been in the flooded driveway, sitting in her floating sedan until the sun had long set, listening to her portable radio. The cul-de-sac’s sidewalks were swamped with their neighbors’ belongings: closets of clothes, tattered armchairs, old bikes and kids’ scooters. To keep her poor vehicle from drifting away, she had to hook its bumper to the trunk of a tree with a sturdy rope.
Earlier, Junie had opened her bedroom window, which was on the second floor, to hear what her mama was listening to. So far, she had gathered the important bits: the Expeditioners had exported the world leaders first and then all those who could afford the multimillion-dollar trip. Everyone else was subject to the lottery. The Blue had been approaching like a slow reaper, with the storms sending water further and further past the coastlines, until the world blinked, and whole cities were gone. Some people—the smallest minority—had submarines prepared exactly for this scenario.
After the Expeditioners barred their doors, there were protests in major cities. Rioting in the streets of DC. Burning monuments, skyrocketing suicide rates, sobbing crowds.
Why not take us all? they cried. At least our children. God, save the children.
Junie waded through the shin-deep water to the other side of the car, opening the passenger door.
“Come in, anak.” Bernila made a sound like a sniffle. She turned the volume knob, muting the radio. “What are you doing out here?”
Junie folded her hands in her lap. “Gizmo and Pip are loud.”
Their cage sat in Junie’s room, perfectly in her view. She would not let them be anywhere else.
“We need to let them go,” Bernila said. “They’ll be trapped in the water if we don’t.”
“But I told Lucas I would take care of them,” Junie protested.
“They are birds, my dear. They can fly above all this mess,” Bernila said. “Come, it’ll be alright. Lay your head on my shoulder. Yes, that’s it.” She stroked the top of Junie’s head, her calloused fingers intertwining with Junie’s dark curls.
Then, she lifted her hand and pat-pat-patted.
Junie’s eyes drooped.
They listened to the sound of the wind rustling through the trees. The night sky had never been so visible, peppered with white stars and the faint lights of Expedition ships—fleeing far, far away. If Junie didn’t know any better, she would have thought the streaks they left behind were comets, or shooting stars.
Junie asked her mama, “Are we going to die on Earth?”
Bernila sighed. Said nothing.
Junie said, with a conviction she didn’t expect from herself, “What’s a balyena?”
There was a flicker of recognition in her mama’s eyes.
“A balyena,” said Bernila, pursing her plump lips, “is a whale.”
“A whale?” Junie turned the word over in her mind: bal-ye-na—over and over, tasting the salt of it, the texture of its fatty blubber. “But there aren’t any of those left.”
They had been gone for years. Caught and starved in stray fishing nets. Suffocated by the garbage, slaughtered by the ships. Beached, at high rates, by the past decade’s superstorms.
Bernila smiled, a distant nostalgia in her expression. “Nonsense. I saw one.”
“Really? When?”
“It’s a long story,” Bernila said. “But maybe it’ll save us yet.”
“But Mama,” Junie said slowly, “the whales . . . the whales are—”
Bernila turned the radio volume back up, drowning out Junie’s rising protests.
When the water had finally submerged the first floor of their house with no clear sign of ever receding, it was Bernila who decided to let Gizmo and Pip go. Among their remaining provisions, the budgies would not survive solely on canned beans, nor in a solitary cage. Junie begrudgingly did the honor of climbing onto their house’s paneled roof, bird cage in tow, and opening their door. Gizmo and Pip trotted reluctantly out of their abode, chirping inquisitively at their temporary caretaker.
“Be free,” Junie whispered, suppressing a wretched cry. “Fly away.”
They spread their wings and flew toward the morning sun until they were just green dots in the distance. Junie tried to imagine Lucas—blonde curls and dimples—a number of lightyears and atmospheric layers away. How was Mars? Venus? The moon? Did the phones work there? Would the place have the Internet? How about school—how long would a school take to pop up on another planet?
“Junie,” Bernila called from the second floor. “Come, get dressed.”
Junie stayed a moment on the roof, searching for Gizmo and Pip on the bright horizon. She’d read in a book once that birds had excellent homing instincts. What if they decided to come back?
“Junie,” Bernila called again.
“I don’t want to go to the party,” Junie huffed. “I want to stay in my room.”
Bernila stuck her head out the window. “Anak, ‘wag ka makulit.”
Junie muttered, “Whatever,” before she kicked the empty birdcage into the water, her heart sinking at the sound of its resounding splash.
They had plans that day: an end-of-the-world party for Those Left Behind graciously hosted by the Padillos, who had babysat Junie when she was younger. With the roads gone under and all vehicles washed into the Big Blue, survivors had taken to salvaged canoes, kayaks, and sturdy pieces of driftwood to get around. By late afternoon, three families came to the Fajardos’ cul-de-sac on Milkweed Street. Their boats floated next to each other like bobbing tree trunks, their lanterns illuminating each brown face.
The older kids were all in one canoe, high schoolers rejoicing in the fact they no longer had homework or college or futures to worry about. One girl began to cry, though—moaning something about never being able to fall in love or to have a husband or to have a kid—and the rest of the teenagers spent an irritating amount of time comforting her.
The Padillos owned a large fishing skiff with worn leather seats and a mysterious amount of gas remaining in its tank. Even in old age, the couple remained the same: unenjoyable company and unfiltered crones. Junie sat at the very back of the Padillos’ skiff, keeping to herself, too busy thinking of Gizmo and Pip. Up front, the adults drank and spoke solemnly in Tagalog.
Junie’s translation skills always took a second longer after anything was said—three seconds longer with Tito Alan Padillo’s slurring grumbling: “—the rich ones first. Always the rich bastards. You know the President got to go first? They probably rounded up all the billionaires and trillionaires on the first day everything went to shit. They were probably gone before lunch. They’re having candlelit dinners on the moon right now. Us? We’re here. We’re here, fucking around with nothing to do but drink, waiting to die.”
“Alan,” Bernila said viciously. “Not in front of the kids.”
His wife interjected, “The radio said there’ll be a storm next week. It’ll start on Sunday, and it’ll last for days. After that, there’ll be a great flood. A quick one—hard and fast. We won’t feel a thing. It’s a mercy.”
“A mercy,” Tito Alan repeated, incredulous. “That’s a word for it.”
“But some people have escaped,” Bernila said. “On submarines.”
The party raised their brows at her. Junie felt a pit rise in her stomach, one of shame or stubbornness or something in between.
“We can’t afford submarines,” Tito Alan snorted. “They cost just as much as the Expedition! But you know what we can afford? Believing in God. Do we all believe in Him here? Ah, that’s good!”
Bernila ignored the agreements around her. “Alan.”
“Soon, we’ll all see each other in His kingdom. We can continue the party there!” He put his bottle to his lips. “But Bernila, if you have another solution, be our guest.”
“Stop it. You’re drunk.”
“When was the last time you taught Junie to pray, Bernila? And I mean pray to God, not that mythic whale you’re always making nonsense about. Who knows, He may send you the submarine you’re looking for.”
“The kids—”
“They can’t even understand us,” Tito Alan snapped. “Not one of them speaks Tagalog. You could only hope there’s Filipino Expeditioners. If not, then we’re the last ones speaking this damn language because not only is our country down under, but our kids will get eaten by the crabs long before we can teach them!”
Junie jumped upright, rocking the boat, protests climbing in her little chest. The adults turned to look at her, and she met her mama’s warning eye.
Junie’s rebellion then turned into something quiet, festering inward instead, dissipating seconds after. She sat, hands in her lap.
Bernila dumped the rest of her wine over the side of the boat, into the Big Blue.
“You all should get home soon,” she said through gritted teeth. “Conserve your gas, your resources. The storm will be coming soon.”
The storm pelted the windows, and it was a miracle that its unrelenting ferocity did not shatter the glass.
The first night was the hardest. Junie stayed with her mama in bed and had no choice but to listen to the bullet-like raindrops pummeling the roof tile and the howling wind stripping the trees of bark and leaves. She worried that their house would cave in around them. She was already finding coastal fishes and blue crabs at the top of the stairs. Everything reeked of saline. When the radio finally ran out of battery, it droned a final line, with two back-to-back Category 4 hurricanes simultaneously overtaking the Southeastern United States, get inside and stay in a windowless room if you can—
Junie had been crying for three straight hours. She was inconsolable, wailing away.
“I don’t want to die, Mama,” she kept saying, “I don’t want to die. We don’t have an Expedition ticket, we don’t have a submarine—”
“Hush now, tama na,” Bernila said.
“I don’t know enough Tagalog. Tito Alan said so. I don’t want to die like that.”
Bernila said firmly, “You are not going to die.”
“But how do you know that?”
“Junie.”
“How do you know?”
Bernila brushed Junie’s hair out of her wet eyes. “If you’ll be quiet for a few minutes, and try your best to go to bed, I will tell you the tale of the time I saw a balyena. How about that? How does that sound?”
Junie stopped hiccuping just enough to answer. “Okay—okay, Mama.”
And then Bernila hugged her tight, pat-pat-patting her, waiting until her eyes were already halfway closed.
In her twenties, Bernila was a thrill-seeking diver, braving the waters of Palawan. Back then, most of the Philippine archipelago, albeit battered by an overactive typhoon season and nearly boiling temperatures, was still above water. Before Junie, she had the freedom to travel, and she’d begun diving when Junie’s father introduced her to a guy who knew a guy who worked at a resort in El Nido. Every summer afterward, she’d sail on a bangka with a gaggle of tourists, poking around underwater shipwrecks, bat caves, limestone islands, and dying coral reefs. She spent those days mingling with sharks and dolphins and schools of fish, learning to hold her breath almost as long as the locals of the municipality.
Once, while she was looking for the mast of a historic sunken ship buried in the sand of shallow waters, she had caught a glimpse of something black in the distance—a gray flipper breaching the water, just before disappearing. The bangka’s crew told her legends of some kind of whale out in those seas—a single one, the last one left on Earth since their supposed extinction years prior.
The whale wasn’t hard to find. All she had to do was dive straight down and follow its song, which had been reverberating across the shores for twelve minutes straight. The seabed was dark, full of scattering shoals and moving sediment. The flat animal was tangled in a heavy fishing net, chirping and whistling in distress. Bernila swam tirelessly until she approached it; its frightened eye darted round and round.
Hold on, Bernila said. Stay still.
It took Bernila nearly fifteen minutes to heave the net off the poor thing. By that time, her oxygen tank was running low, begging her to resurface. The whale, kicking its flippers and its great tail free, made an excited noise, butting its massive head into Bernila’s ticklish side. She snorted into her snorkel, making a million bubbles billow out around them.
Then, in the distant ocean, there was a vast and looming blackness making a bawling sort of noise—the weeping of a mother whale, looking for her young. The smaller, rescued whale responded with a squeak, scurrying off into the dark.
As Bernila swam up to the surface, the massive creature—so big she could only see its god-like eye when it opened right beside her—bellowed out a ferocious chirp. Her young joined contentedly by her side.
Bernila froze, looking into the mother’s cavernous gaze, its clear whites, its void-like pupil. It opened its mouth, and Bernila thought it was going to suction her up and swallow her whole.
Instead, it repeated, like a lilting melody, a singular phrase: salamat po, salamat po, salamat po.
Shortly after the storm had ended on Wednesday, Bernila and Junie moved to the roof with their blankets and pillows and her twin mattress, and slept under the stars. Junie’s skin was still pruned from wading in the floodwater for hours. She and her mama watched it surpass the stairs, pooling into her second floor room, until it had finally stopped at Junie’s knees.
With the entire neighborhood underwater, Junie considered that she and her mama might have been atop the only dry surface left in the entire world.
Her mama was quiet. Thinking about something. The stars were in her gaze. Junie curled next to her, drawing her knees close to her chest.
“Mama,” she whispered, “you can get on the mattress.”
“There’s no room,” her mama said. Her body was flopped against the tiles. “It’s okay, I’m comfortable here.”
“Mama, don’t be silly,” Junie said. “I can scoot over. Just—”
“You know—” Bernila suddenly turned to her side, facing her. “—there is a fun fact I looked up a few years back. Some whales look after each other’s young. Isn’t that incredible? When adult whales dive for food, their calves cannot follow—”
“Mama.”
“—so other whales babysit the mother’s young while she goes to eat. They even have babysitting circles. Incredible things.”
Junie puffed out her cheeks. “Mama, all the whales are dead.”
Bernila laughed, a hollow and strained sound, rolling flat on her back. “Nonsense. Don’t you remember my story?”
“Yes, but it’s just a story.” Junie once again patted the mattress, this time hitting it hard so that her palm stung. “Plus, I learned it in science class. All the whales are gone. They have been gone. So can you stop?”
Her mama laughed again. It made Junie’s eye twitch. But instead of bickering about it, Junie took her mama’s hand, yanking her forward until she complied. They laid in the same mattress, both of their rumps sticking out over the edges, staring at each other in contemplative silence.
“Tita said there’ll be a great flood next,” Junie said. “After the storm.”
“Yes,” her mama said.
“And . . . we’re just waiting for it?”
Her mama nodded slowly. “Yes.”
Junie sighed, deep and long. “Maybe we can still find a submarine somewhere.”
“Hmm.” Her mama put a finger to her chin. “Maybe. If one washes up just in time.”
“Will you tell me if it does?”
“Okay, Junie,” she said.
Junie glanced at the stars. “It’s getting late, mama. We should sleep.”
Her mama said, “In a moment. Let me look at you for a while.”
And she reached forward with her palm, placing it on Junie’s thigh.
Pat-pat-pat.
Junie closed her eyes.
Pat-pat—
And waited to die.
One fact to know about Junie is that for the vast majority of her early childhood, Junie had made it a habit to sleep past the loudest sounds and the most calamitous disasters.
For that reason, Junie had no recollection of that one summer dawn, just before the definite end of the world, when an animal’s song rang out across their neighborhood, and a great balyena approached the Fajardos’ house on the cul-de-sac of Milkweed Street.
Bernila was already wide awake. She detangled herself from Junie’s side, looking into the muddy water. In their drowned neighborhood, among the debris of power lines and cars and naked trees, was a black eye. It opened underwater, regarding Bernila like an old friend, and then its gray, barnacled head broke the surface, pushing crabs and saltwater and old junk out of the way.
Bernila whispered, “I never thought you’d come. How’s the little one?”
The whale bobbed its head. She is long grown now. Thank you.
“There’s nothing to thank.” Bernila slid her arms under Junie’s back, lifting her up and carrying her toward the edge of the roof, toward the whale.
It crooned, I can’t fit the both of you.
“I know,” Bernila said. “It’s just her.”
And you? the whale sang.
Bernila smiled. She didn’t say anything.
The whale opened its mouth wide. Past the rows of orange baleen, the pink and fleshy tongue, the pooling water in its lower jaw, was its belly—dark and warm, empty, with just enough space for a young one.
“Speak to her in Tagalog,” Bernila said. “She’ll need the practice.”
She laid Junie’s small, scrunched body on the whale’s tongue. Junie’s chest rose and fell. She was stuck in a dream, and with the way she was smiling, she was dreaming about something sweet.
“Salamat,” Bernila said to the whale. “Salamat po.”
And then the whale shut its mouth, enclosing Junie in its warm flesh, retreating into the ocean. It swallowed Junie, without difficulty, whole.
Here was Junie’s last dream:
As Junie laid her head upon her damp sheets, her mama pat-pat-patting her, she thought absurdly of her mama’s soft shoulders, her elbows, and her fingertips—slowly sprouting long emerald feathers, curling into birds’ wings. In the dream, Junie, also a transformed bird, flew away with her mama. They hurtled past the layers of atmospheres, past the bright stars, twirling around and around each other as the wind caught their wings. In their newfound flight, they found the budgies. And after their journey to the Expeditioners’ new stars, Junie brought Gizmo and Pip back to Lucas, who was already waiting for her on some distant moon.
As the flood came, Bernila imagined herself as a young diver. She stretched her strong limbs, taking in steady breaths—letting the air fill her lungs. When she dove, she expected an immediate impact, but it didn’t come. Instead, she began to swim, deeper and deeper, among the bubbles ballooning from her nose, just as she had always known. She swam along the floating tires and sheet metal and wooden slats. She found remnants of mailboxes and couches and roof shingles. They mingled around her like fish. The seabed, the long-submerged sidewalk, was like a forest of vibrant coral.
She thought of Junie. How she’d awaken from her dream, safe and warm. Some time in the future, maybe those who escaped in submarines would resurface. They would repopulate the Earth, on whatever land was left after the water receded, and start over. Or, maybe they would evolve into underwater people and create a spanning aquatic city. Or, long before all that, maybe Junie would be found by the Expeditioners, and she would join the colonies in the stars, still speaking her native tongue.
Nevertheless, here and now, Junie in the whale remained on Earth.
She, like Those Left Behind, will remember everything from before.
Tuesday Pil’s writing features themes of anticolonialism, environmental justice, queer identity, grief, and unapologetic Filipino/Filipino-American kids that proudly exercise healthy amounts of rebellion. Born in Manila, she now resides in North Carolina. Her work can be found in Archive of the Odd (soon!), Tea Table Magazine, and The Candid Review. When she is not writing, she is reading, eating mangoes, or playing Dungeons & Dragons. Details of her shenanigans and her other published works can be found on her blog: tuesdaywrites.wordpress.com as well as her Instagram and Twitter: @tuesday_writes. She is currently represented by her lovely agent, Andie Smith, for her middle grade fantasy novel.