TNB Original Fiction: “Whale Love,” by Bobbie Ann Mason & Meg Pokrass

Louisa

Louisa, who tucked up her skirts and went running every day or she would go mad, was confounded and smothered by the whales of Concord, like Mr. E, on whom she had a crush when she was a child and left him flowers under his window, flowers found and laughed at by Mrs. E, who had to put up with all his giggly acolytes, who arranged themselves prettily at his feet, including that lunatic Jonas Very, to whom Mr. E was always so kind even though Jonas Very was very very unpoetic and it would kill him to think so, but aside from Mr. E and stately Mr. H, whom she privately liked to call Nat, because he was so very very formal and distant, always walking along the Lexington Road with his head bent in thought, there was princely Henry, and on that spring evening she was running to meet Henry in his rowboat–Henry in his rowboat, playing his flute!–and overcome by her freedom from the whales of philosophy she did a sort of handspring in the path and accidentally felled a small dead tree.