Menopause doesn’t happen to animals because their lives are short. Except for pilot whales, and also killer whales who can live past 90. In her thirties, a killer female stops reproducing to yield to her daughters, and to realize the grandchildren. Her pod must stay together, a simple design, this gathering village. Sex ends for the next fifty years. She has no further need for his penis as long as a hose, the weightless contact, distant, like jumbo jets refueling in mid-air. Anyway, she will miss more how they used to side-swim and spy-bob, how they broke the surface, vertical, for a look above. Fathers leave for new mounts. Sons stay because their families survive longer in the invisible net of the mother, her flashes cooled by deeper water.


On the inimitable Wigleaf.