edited by Ziv Wities
Content note (click for details)
This story contains references to the death of a child, to victims of natural disasters, and to the butchering of a mythical creature.No one knew how the fisherman had managed to hook Leviathan. We did not know with what he baited his angle, or how he had unspooled enough line to pierce the very heart of the deep. We could not imagine how his little, peeling skiff did not immediately capsize at the first touch of the monster’s weight, nor where in all the world he found enough wind to tow it back to shore. All that the people of my village knew was that we awoke one morning, and we did not hear the crash of waves.
I was one of the first to follow the smell of black rum and rotting seaweed down past the seawall separating our crag-nested village from the shore. The ocean was as still and smooth as a mirror, and beached Leviathan ranged into the west. Atop its nearest appendage, a forest of fleshy, cap-tipped tube-trunks flopped and twitched, turgid tangles glistening purply in the sun. The forest was divided by stiff cartilage combs like cliffs, and discharges of electricity skipped across their puckered peaks. Colonies of coral and barnacles clung at the bases of the tube-trunks, and everywhere worms and lobsters and snails crawled. The flesh was studded all over with shining, opalescent lenses like a peacock’s hundred eyes and scabby pores that sometimes turned into geysers, spewing oil and salt water and sulphureous gas. Two of the butcher’s boys swore they even saw some of the pores belch fire.
On the beach in front of Leviathan, the fisherman had upturned his skiff into an impromptu stand for selling. Nobody knew who he was, but he passed easily enough for one of us. He had white bristles that sometimes glinted and wrinkled hands callused and spotted with melanoma. He reminded me of my grandfather, beaming with pride over his Sunday catch. Children and adults alike would creep down and ask how he’d managed to capture Leviathan. He’d smile under his straw hat, maybe muss the hair of one of the children. He gave the same answer every time: “Love.”
I for my part did not really care how he’d caught it. All I cared about was that he killed it. I came out every day to watch as the fisherman stood before his catch, rapping my knuckles on our now-useless seawall, ignoring the flowers dying of thirst in the windows of my taberna and the sick husband at home who needed me to dab the sweat from his brow. I watched the still waters. Leviathan was the terror of the deep: none had ever seen it before the fisherman, but all knew the monster that crawled the seafloor, stirring up storms and killer tides on the surface. Such peace there was in the ocean, now that Leviathan had been hauled out.
Over time, scavengers scuttled down the seawall with bits of silver clanging in their pockets: fishwives, haberdashers, trypotters, and terrace farmers, all hungry for meat, baleen, and blubber. They came with their flensing knives, ice chests, and tallow-boxes to see if there was anything they could glean from Leviathan. One by one, the fisherman turned them all away.
“Leviathan is the jewel of creation,” he said. “Look at his body-crown of podia, his thousand mighty arms for rowing up whirlpools and giant waves. Behold how his masted cockscombs dance and spark to charge the clouds with thunder. Countless proud ships and islands whole has he knocked down and sucked up. And you want to put him in a pot of Caldeirada? Use him to mend your laundry baskets and stay your corsets? Light lanterns from him to help you pace your sleepless nights? No, no…”
I did not care if it became soup or compost or a rotting mass under the heat of the sun. The jewel of my creation had been on one of those ships that Leviathan had knocked down and sucked up: just a little thing named Clara. She would never grow old enough for corsets or sleepless nights, but she had liked tangerines, and to wear green ribbons in her hair.
The fisherman had no songs of praise for Clara. He loved only his monstrous catch, and none of our villagers who came to barter were deemed worthy.
On the fourth or fifth day after the fisherman came to us, six square-rigged caravels appeared on the horizon. They did not continue for the mainland as did most imperial slave ships, but cut across the unnaturally smooth waters straight for us. Shortly after noon, they put down anchor about a mile upshore from the nearest end of Leviathan. The people who came down the gangway were no slavers. They were men and women, their skin ranging dark to fair, but all dressed alike in matching white chitons with flying fish embroidered round the edges. A small congregation came down the shore, hefting a random array of pikes and arquebuses and crossbows. Their magister, a woman as dark as pitch, with fin-wings woven in her hair, stepped forward to speak with the fisherman.
“We saw the oceans go smooth and knew that, at last, someone had hooked Leviathan. Give us the body. We will pay you whatever we can, but in the end, you must give it to us.”
The fisherman rubbed his white bristles and studied the magister. He did not appear to pay any mind to the motley of weapons she’d brought with her.
“And what shall you use his body for?” he asked.
“To build a just city,” said the magister. “Only Leviathan can provide the foundation.”
The fisherman coughed out a laugh.
“True enough. I wonder, though, what do you mean to do with all his podia, each one with the power to stir the tides to fury?”
“With these we shall build a moving platform for our city,” said the magister. “We shall crawl the world’s oceans and visit all its greatest ports. We’ll smash their auction blocks with great waves and carry away the liberated slaves as our citizens. If they desire.”
“Hmm. And what shall you do with his magnificent, storm-fathering combs?”
“These we shall bend into coils and use to power our city,” said the magister. “Some work is not worthy of human hands. We shall build machines to thresh and grind and press and fold.”
“And what shall you do with the poisons of his belly?” asked the fisherman. “All these firedamps and nightshades and ichors oozing out?”
“For each of these our pharmacy will find a use,” said the magister. “His firedamps we shall dissolve into water and use to cure diseases ranging from blindness to fever to flux. His nightshades we shall decoct into suppressants and stimulants, so that we may master our desires. In his ichor, we believe, there is even the secret to raise the dead, once we find the right way to refine it.”
For every body part that the fisherman named, the magister found ready a use. Leviathan’s meat would be salted and dried to feed the city for a hundred years and produce a population long-lived, healthy, and strong. Its valves would be set to raise buildings higher than any made from wood, steel, or stone – such was necessary to capitalize on the platform-city’s limited space. The lenses that spotted its body and served it for eyes in the darkest deeps would be installed at the top of their spires to refract the light and crown the just city with glory.
The fisherman rubbed his bristles again and watched the noon light scatter off Leviathan’s many lenses. He overturned his skiff again and climbed in the keel, rested his head on the gunwale, and pulled his straw hat down. “Well, don’t let me stop you. You know your business.”
The magister nodded carefully and sent her people back to the ships. They returned with at least a hundred workers now armed with boarding knives, fin-chains, and blubber hooks. They soon discovered, however, they didn’t know how even to start to clean Leviathan. They broke into teams to survey its great length and create a body plan, but they couldn’t tell tail from head nor top from bottom. Some thought they’d located Leviathan’s underbelly, but once they started cutting, they discovered just under the skin a smooth interlinking set of white, pink-flecked valves, harder than steel. They thought they were getting somewhere when their surveyors discovered a mouth—a great wet chasm surrounded by dendritic tentacles, long concentric rows of teeth slanting inward. The magister began a map of the body assuming this was the head, but then some of her scouts came up from the southwest and said they had discovered another hole exactly the same. The magister reasoned that one must be the mouth and the other the anus, but while they debated over which was which, reports came that they had discovered a third such hole, and the magister ripped up her map.
Finally as the sun was setting, the magister and her people returned to the fisherman for help. The fisherman peeped out with one eye from beneath his straw hat. “It’s late now. Come back tomorrow.”
Most of the village shunned the pirate utopians when they sought food and lodging for the night—someone was going to come looking for that many escaped slaves—so most of them stayed on their ships. I let a few take rooms in my taberna, though. I even took bread and soup with the magister, and let her thrill me with talk of miraculous cures brewed from the bile of monsters. I stayed up half the night listening to my husband breathe, and when I finally closed my eyes, I dreamt of Clara laughing as she rode Leviathan.
I awoke in the black of morning to the worst storm that ever struck our island. Sheets of rain assaulted our walls, and the very air seemed to vibrate. I got up from bed to look out the window; webs of lightning illuminated the village enough for me to see. Debris piled in the praça, sugarcane and grapevines ripped from their terrace plots and flung like blades of glass. I stared dumbfounded until—boom—a gong of thunder cracked the very glass I was looking through.
He’d let it loose.
Despite the gasping protests of my husband, I wrapped myself in a cloak and fought lashing winds down to the shore. I had to see.
Our little seawall stood bravely as blocks of white water slammed it again and again and again. The water wound back after each assault, revealing deep rents in the gravel where Leviathan had been. Of course the monster was gone, and of course the six caravels of the pirate utopians were nowhere to be seen. They must have been smashed to pieces and pulled down to the depths; I could not spot even a piece of driftwood large enough for a survivor to cling to, had there been any.
As I looked to where the ships were anchored, however, I noticed I was not alone. A few dozen paces down, a figure was beating their hands bloody on the seawall, ferocious almost as the pummeling waves. I thought I recognized the magister, but as I tried to move towards her, a gust of wind blew up from behind and pushed me to my knees. Before I could recover, lightning struck not ten feet away, and for several minutes I could hear nothing but the ghost of its thunder.
As I sat stunned and deafened, I noticed a shape bobbing out on the ocean in the deep water. In my daze I saw it somehow clearer than anything else—the fisherman’s skiff, bobbing like a cork in the deepest, most violent part of the storm.
“Why did you do it?” I screamed out to him, but I could not even hear my own words over Leviathan’s thunder. I do not think the fisherman heard me either, and if he did, he did not answer.
© 2025 by A.J. Rocca
1994 words
Author’s Note: In addition to the existence of sea cucumbers, this story owes a huge debt to God’s Monsters by Hebrew Bible Scholar Esther J. Hamori. The book contains a phenomenal chapter on Leviathan and how, despite being the adversary of the Biblical God, God also seems to adore it; according to Hamori, he even recites ancient Hebrew love poetry to it. What could it possibly mean that God loves some horrible monster like that? I guess I can’t blame him because, while writing the story, I fell in love with Leviathan too!
A.J. Rocca is an English instructor and journalist from The Republic of Forgottonia (also known as Western Illinois). He specialized in the study of speculative fiction while pursuing his MA, and now he writes both SFF criticism as well as his own fiction. He also likes to cook. In the photo, he can be pictured with a bag of freshly caught cicadas which were later turned into bisque; it was so good that a few of the people who tried it even dared to ask for seconds. If you, too, would dare ask for seconds, then you can find more of A.J.’s work collected on his website: theymightbewindmills.com
If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings. A.J. Rocca’s story “Of the Duly Conducted and Mostly Unremarkable Meeting of Don Quotidene and the Giants of Andalia” was previously published here in Diabolical Plots on July 1, 2022.