"Whalewriter"

SET-UP
Keira Knightly has an emotionally isolated childhood living on a British Conservatory College. The grounds are immaculate and impersonal like her mother, Meryl Streep. Streep, a bone-cold widow, immerses herself in work as stern lead professor of Arctic wildlife conservation essay-writing at the school. Keira’s bookish, land-locked father died in childbirth.

OPENING
Keira wanders on large lava rocks scattered over the shore, massaging the soles of her feet into the red porous surface. Cool surf and mist gush through the natural rock crevices. Keira visibly relishes the refreshment of salty spray on her exposed Anglo face and collarbones, framed above the rectangle-cut neckline of her linen dress. Whale songs sing beneath rhythmic shore sounds. The atmosphere is overcast in a painterly gray. Hazy wildlife shots, specifically polar bears and whales are cut in.

Keira (meditative, with accent):

Look at this whale… did you know… that a whale’s heart… can keep the rate… at which it pumps blood… that vital life force… through the great matriarch’s veins… at just fifteen beats per minute… ? Imagine then… how her heart does sound… as she is dying...

::cue mournful whale call::

I.
Streep spitefully teaches class from a traditional podium. The class sits in a small auditorium-style room with dark wooden fold-up desks. Class ends, disperses, and Meryl takes a deep sigh.

Streep leaves class and enters her office. The far wall is lined with framed class pictures, awards, and attendance sheets of yore. A helpful phone call fills us in that grant money once devoted to Arctic conservation essay-writing is melting away in favor of more practically-minded course work. Meryl straightens some frames, hangs phone to receiver, coughs a little blood and retrieves a jar from the bottom drawer of her desk. Meryl has taken to eating pickled herring in her twilight. Her health has begun to decline ever since Keira, turning 17, left her to work on a research ship-cum-bandit environmental water vessel.

Meryl is dying and Keira is pursuing love amongst bearded, dirty raincoat-wearing seafarers.

II.
Keira’s rebellion to her mother is manifested in her life of adventure that Meryl can apparently only write of. The Arctic adventure boat has special interests that are explored in short episodes. They include:

-a polar bear undertakes swims of increasing length and difficulty to find the next iceberg

-newborn turtles following instinct to the ocean, to a specific island to mate, and back to their home shore

-a beached whale who cannot be saved

During these, Keira's attempts at love with crewmates yeilds lukewarm results at best, triggering despondence. The beached whale episode pushes her over the edge and she sets sail for home.

III.
Keira returns to the Conservatory in time to find Meryl Streep lying on her deathbed. Meryl’s office is converted to a workable hospital room. Keira adroitly affixes her upper lip stiff. With a sense of duty, she sits next to Meryl, holds her hand and turns her head away. Fluorescent light pours down Meryl’s face, bangs matted to her temples with something like regret in her eyes. She looks up and composes a quite arresting visage that pleas for understanding. Keira gives a nostril exhalation of feigned contempt, but is undercut with insecurity. She leans in and rests her cheek to Streep’s chest. Streep's eyes relax.

Streep's pale, smooth skin is visibly clammy, looking waxen all the more from candle light suddenly replacing the fluorescence. Her face and chest get a spritz of clam juice from a perfume atomizer for this effect. Keira listens to the heartbeat of her mother, a cold beached whale, as the heartbeat decreases in regularity.


A electrocardiograph machine displays green mountains of precious cardiac action, in intervals more distant than the last. Keira’s eyes dilate with each new green streak.

Slow fade in of the endangered polar bear swimming from berg to dwindling berg. Meryl’s diaphragm heaves up in one final hurrah as if to ascend from her bed and just as soon the air escapes her torso. Meryl dies.

IV.
As the sole living being in the room, Keira now allows herself to be overcome with emotion. She spies the pickled herring jar on a steel side table. It holds just an ounce of gray, sandy liquid. The wall furthest from the bed holds the framed photographs and diplomas. Keira tosses the jar at the decorated wall with rather effete passion, the impact is surprisingly violent. A beat passes in time. Keira sniffles, sways her back, straightens it and goes to the horde of glass shards.

Keira rummages the pile, discovers pictures hidden beneath the forwardly displayed artifacts and begins to collate. In the unearthed Polaroids, young Meryl is depicted on an Arctic crew boat, beaming happily in some and scowling in others. As Keira organizes the photos, an obvious narrative of passion, ennui and heartbreak—leading from worldly adventure to the stifled university—takes shape. The narrative begins with water, bearded and rugged men and ends with library shelves, and Keira’s spindly father.

V.
A flashback to the baby turtles episode of aquatic instinct elucidates Keira’s journey’s larger meaning. She inner monologues the epiphany.

Baby Turtle Keira fingers up a sacramental portion of the gray herring juice from the floor, scooping it to her lips and swallows. She understands her new destiny as a land-locked, self-loathing ecological essay instructor.


CODA
There is a knock.

“I hope I’m not interrupting,” interrupts a bookish and scrawny student who is Keira’s age and looks like Knightley in man-drag.

“No, not at all...” replies Keira.

::cue ocean shore sounds::

--END--

(The Chekhov’s gun in this story is that Streep’s ashes are scattered inside of her dead husband’s preserved urethra.)