Lungs
2026 Broad Ripple Review Prize Winner in Creative Nonfiction
I am standing on the Provincetown pier, waiting to board a whale-watching boat, when I get a text from my aunt saying my dad’s left lung has collapsed. My legs turn liquid and I kneel, one knee against the rough hot boards. Nobody looks at me, nobody asks if I’m okay. Maybe they think I’m retying my shoes. My aunt says she will keep me posted. I tell myself there is nothing I can do right now, force my feet up the metal gangplank step by echoing step while my entire body tells me to run. Run as if I had on flying shoes and could skywalk my way to Houston. I make my body breathe instead. I focus on filling my lungs from the bottom up. It feels now that I’m breathing for him too. The boat’s engines thrum under the thin soles of my sneakers.
Four days into my writing residency in a dune shack on the Cape Cod National Seashore, Dad received his first radiation treatment for liver cancer. A few hours after treatment, he began to uncontrollably vomit blood. He was put under heavy sedation and a Blakemore tube was inserted to stop the bleeding. I was told to stay where I was, that they only allow one visitor in the ICU at a time, that I would see him when he woke up. He never did. My father died the moment I was crossing the North Carolina state line on my drive home.
The naturalist on board tells us all about the whales we hope to encounter as we round Race Point Beach and head toward the deep waters of Stellwagen Bank. During their summer stay at these rich feeding grounds, a humpback whale will eat up to three thousand pounds of krill a day. In the fall, they will migrate five thousand miles to Caribbean breeding grounds. I focus hard on these whale facts, anchoring myself in information. To keep terror at bay, I’ve stayed up reading everything I can find online in response to my aunt’s updates. The more technical the vocabulary, the better. I roll terms like esophageal varices and radioembolization like rosary beads in my mind. A stranger passes me a bristly plank of baleen from a dead whale’s mouth and I clutch it like a lifebuoy. My father is drowning on dry land, and I am lost at sea.
We are informed that humpback whales have lungs the size of Priuses. I can’t help but notice the singularity, the appeal to a likely left-leaning audience (we all paid seventy-five dollars a pop to watch whales, didn’t we?) with this specific choice of simile. I rattled my way up here in an ancient work truck. I imagine Dad’s arched eyebrow⎯a gift from his mother that he passed on to me⎯and his sotto voce commentary. “Priuses, seriously? Damn Yankees.”
I am living my wildest childhood dream. Out of the cold depths the whales come. A gigantic body gently breaks the water’s surface and we gasp as one. From the humpback bursts a spray of air, all diamonds floating in sunlight. Then it dives, gives a languid lift of a fluke like a parade queen’s wave, and is gone. The naturalist tells us that in Hawaiian mythology, the circle of bubbles left in the wake of a whale’s dive is a portal to the underworld. In my mind I execute a perfect swan dive over the boat rail and slip through the center of the ring. Like a free diver after a pearl, I want to pluck my father’s soul from its in-between place in the dark. Don’t go. Don’t go.
When the tour ends, I return to the sand cliffs overlooking the shore, where I watch whales spout in the distance. Priusfuls of air blast upward from the exhalations of giants. This miracle never gets old. An enormous splash, a distant wall of white. A breaching. Scientists can’t figure out why whales leap from the waves. I think it must be for joy. Something rips out of me, a kind of ecstatic laugh-sob, a gasp of delight, a sound of wounding. My own pink lungs⎯the size, maybe, of a Prius’ glovebox⎯slam shut, sending me to my knees in the rugosa. The swallows swoop by so close I can feel the breeze from their kitelike wings. Towering columns of whale breath erupt on the horizon. The world continues to sing.
About the Author
Lindsey Pharr received her MFA from the Naslund-Mann School of Writing at Spalding University. Her work has been listed as Notable by Best American Essays, received multiple Pushcart nominations, and has appeared in Brevity, SmokeLong Quarterly, River Teeth, and elsewhere. Read more on her website at www.lindsey-pharr.com.