A Penny for your Thoughts. E.D. Squadroni

themselves in their also evolving world around them. The weak die off and the strong get stronger. It’s an awful outcome for mankind.”

      Silence followed. Walter stopped so suddenly, Brixton didn’t know how to respond. He was right. It was an awful outcome.

      “Why would they need to change? We haven’t done anything to them.”

      “Precisely my son. Whales are animals devoted to communication and survival. When we quit fishing, the marine population increased significantly. When that goes up, things get crowded. A new system then gets created.”

      Brixton couldn’t tell whether he was still talking about the whales or their current situation they were living in. Today the term was called Genetic Fortitude not evolution.

      “Study some literature on them. I’m sure you will find them to be fascinating creatures. Pay particular enough attention to the blue whale, the killer whale, and of course the great humpback.”

      Brixton did as he was told and checked out every textbook he could find on whales from the library. He studied everything about them from their anatomy all the way to their individual and social behaviors. Walter was right, they were fascinating.

      The humpback whale was said to create a song that lasted up to twenty minutes. They sang this song for hours without pause. During the winter months, they would not eat and solely live on the fat they had reserved.

      The killer whale, he read, was much different. They had teeth and traveled in large groups. What made them so unpredictable was the fact that they all had different types of prey. Some ate only small fish while others ate larger sea animals. Their unpredictability made them dangerous.

      It was the blue whale that fascinated Brixton the most. Blue whales were the largest animal to have ever existed with humans that scientists knew of. Some of the larger ones could grow to almost one hundred feet long. Brixton couldn’t imagine, no matter how hard he tried, a living breathing creature that long. He immediately ran outside and measured one hundred feet to see how long that actually was.

      “No way,” he said as he looked down the street at his starting marker. “No animal could ever be that big.” However bizarre the idea, he knew Walter would never steer him in the wrong direction. The books also reinforced what he had told him already. It had to be true. From then on, he studied everything Walter told him to.

      Now, almost ten years later, Walter and Brixton evolved into great friends. When Brixton entered the lighthouse, Walter tucked his pipe into the front pocket of his hunter green, wool vest that he wore every day. A silver chain dangled outside the same pocket attaching itself to the end of his pocket watch. There were no carvings on his watch but it had to be just as old as the wood pipe.

      A gift from his father, he had said. Which confirmed that the pipe must have been too. It stopped working years ago Walter told him, but he liked to keep it to monumentalize where he came from.

      “Anything from family is worth keeping,” he always said.