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Could you hear him sing from where you are, Mother? The whales would welcome him to their choir, so mystical a sound does Benigno’s voice make. And given so freely! Does he not comprehend its value?

If this prison is punishment for my entanglement with humans, I cannot fathom the meaning of this man’s attentions—nor that he sings about the sea whilst under the waves our elders’ songs are abundant with human barbarism. Their refrains interrogate the Deep: What of the endless Age of Warships? Of men who, battling from nearly every shore, murder without mercy nor necessity nor care for the poisons their ear-rupturing weapons spray into our waters? What of the ocean kindred we cannot save from their harpoons? Of the brutality humans committed on their trading vessels— to their own kind ?

“I have heard their strange music and found peace in its noise,” you once told me. “Many humans are lost. But not all.”

My cell is haunted by a man who would destroy me by my ears—and guarded by another who would relieve me by them. Our elders were not wrong. But you were also right.

A new ache dwells in my spirit tonight I dare not examine, and yet, what else can I do in this cage with so costly a gift as Benigno’s song except place it in my heart beside the moon?

Would that he had sung for me until the dawn.