Kimiko Hahn’s most recent book is The Artist’s Daughter. Having just completed a collection of prose and poetry loosely based on Japanese classical forms, she plans to get to work on a series inspired by science articles. The Blob Kimiko Hahn In 1896—nearly fifty years after Melville’s masterpiece, three years before Freud’s Dream and my grandpa’s journey across the Pacific— a storm shoved seven tons of white blob onto a St. Augustine shore: twenty-one monstrous feet of glistening flesh— a surviving archaist or alien or devil of the deep. Chunks were immediately shipped to the nascent Smithsonian for display then storage; until, one hundred years later, a Florida scientist examined the same specimen, as well as new blobs floated up from the depths— declaring the cryptozoological curios merely the remains of large cetaceans. The narrative of the stupefying has closed with nothing more than pure collagen washed up from the ocean’s unconscious. Sad to say.