Alex Carolan

Lolita

Tokitae’s last moments in the wild were all thrash and bluster. Orcas are powerful creatures but they are no match for the spotter planes or the speed boats or the bombs—Did you know they can throw firecrackers under water?—that in 1970 drove the whales from the Puget Sound, cradled between Victoria and Seattle, into the nets of men who had expected perhaps a dozen of the animals, and not the 80 that bucked and hurled through the cove where the traps had been set. One mother drowned tearing through the nets. She had wanted to reach her calf, which, until that day, had swum at her side, in training to hunt and breach. Whale catchers sliced open the sides of four calves who died and sank them with rocks and anchors. People who live near this cove are still haunted by the sound of orcas screaming, terribly, through the night.

Tokitae, a calf herself, had lived. They carried her to the Miami Seaquarium, where they housed her in a tank 80 feet long and 35 feet wide and nearly uninhabitable. They renamed her Lolita. Back in the Puget Sound she could travel hundreds of miles across the water. Back in the Puget Sound she could stun unsuspecting sea birds with tail strikes and breach the water as she pleased. Back in the Puget Sound she never veered far from her mother, Ocean Sun, who was let loose that night by men overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of animals that let out their shrill, panicked, sounds as babies would in the night.

It wasn’t all bad. Lolita took kindly to Hugo, the male orca they paired her with, and they mated unsuccessfully several times, one could only assume, out of pleasure. A few times they canceled the whale show because of this raucous display in the tank no larger than a one-bedroom apartment.

One day they found Hugo dead after ramming his head repeatedly into the side of the enclosure, resulting in a brain aneurysm. Animals in captivity practice what are called repetitive motions. Now, Lolita chews on concrete. Now, she swims in a circle. Now, she bobs her head along the surface in the same bored way.

There’s a world in which Lolita is netted and lifted from the tank she once shared with Hugo. They would lug her 7,000 pound body back 4,000 miles across the country along with her Pacific white-sided dolphin companion, back to the Puget Sound and her natal waters of the Salish Sea. There, Lolita would live within an ocean sanctuary, tended to by trainers, becoming increasingly dependent on the fish that filter in and out of the netting. There’s a chance that she might let out her call, a desperate pitch distinctive to the members of her family, and that Ocean Sun might come swimming her way, thinking that the sound reminded her of the daughter she had once, briefly, in these tender waters.

Alex Carolan is a writer based in Baltimore. Previous work of hers was published in The Pinch Journal, and she has work forthcoming in the Cimarron Review and the Southern Indiana Review. She has an MFA in fiction from the University of New Hampshire.