Short story: dani burlison
Shark Week
I once came close to drowning as a child. I remember taking that dreaded, slow-motion step from shallow to deep and slipping under, eyes wide, attempting to scream for help. Bubbles escaped from my mouth, blurring my view. The chlorine tasted sharp as water gushed into my nose and down my throat. An adult dove in to catch me, her pale body dressed in a floral purple one piece, breaking through the barrier between water and oxygen. She wrapped me in a towel before scolding me and leaving me to sit under a walnut tree in the hot California air. I watched as my friends twisted and dove like mermaids the rest of the afternoon. I didn't learn to swim for three years after that, when I was ten.
I spent those three years on the second step of a friend's swimming pool and watched as everyone else dove for rings and had underwater tea parties with their eyes wide open in the crystally, sparkling pool. Above water, their eyes pinched tightly as they shouted “Marco” and “Polo” and dunked their heads under again and again.
Eventually I was brave enough to lower myself down those steps. That was the summer I began spending time alone in the creek that curved past my house. I'd maneuver beyond blackberry bushes and through rocky pools with crawdads and minnows and tangles of moss, wading into the deepest part of the creek, imagining the Loch Ness Monster or pirates waiting for me around the bend. I searched for water sprites for protection. Part of me hoped I'd wander so far down that shallow creek that I'd get lost and find a magical treasure and never have to go back home. That was also the summer my thirteen-year old cousin drowned. She dove into a lake, surrounded by aspen and whitebark pine, and didn't come back up. She was buried high above another lake, on a dry patch of native burial land near a scattering of manzanita and Douglas fir.
I sifted through these memories as an unkind lover drove me west to Dillon Beach, where he planned to coax me into the cold February sea and teach me how to surf. I told myself that if I faced my fear of water and faced my fear of him that weekend that I would emerge triumphant, like an Olympian. Medals and prizes and a newfound confidence would be waiting for me on the other side.
We arrived at the modest beach house with its flimsy faux wood paneling, thick brown carpet and a large sofa, printed with flowers and wheat fields in golds and browns, and a rush of salty, seaweeded air overwhelmed me. I could taste my own fear—metallic and hollow—as I peered out over more small vacation houses and down to a gray cove of waves heaving onto the beach. A stinging, sideways rain blew in from the west and to my relief, surfing was postponed until the following day.
I unpacked and occasionally peeked out at the violent water rushing and retreating along the beach as my unkind lover clicked on the big box TV. He decided to watch Shark Week, a non-stop, 24/7 marathon of shark attacks filmed all over the world. Each episode was edited like a scene from a horror movie, with action soundtracks and bright blue water clouding with blood from the sharks' victims. The unkind lover insisted we watch the episodes through the duration of our stay.
The cove we'd be surfing at was notorious for shark sightings, though I only heard of a few attacks there. One victim was a man I know whose leg is a maze of teeth marks and stitches where the doctors reattached his shredded flesh. But he survived, I reminded myself. And now he's one of the strongest men I know. Sharks or no sharks, Northern California waves can creep up without warning and pull people out with their fierce undertow. Those waves crash down and knock the oxygen right out of lungs before tossing bodies around like wet rag dolls. Sometimes those bodies are never found.
I tried to ignore the shark attacks on the TV and read stories about missing people and strange disappearances instead. I read through stories of missing and murdered indigenous women, how it seemed like no one even looked for them. I scoured page after page of magazine articles about women and girls whose bodies are found in lakes and creeks. I listened to a Tom Waits song about a young girl who went missing from my neighborhood and was discovered dead near a local freeway ramp that often pooled up with water in the winter. Her murderer was never found.
So many women and girls disappear, their entire lives reduced to awkward snapshots on the evening news. Newscasters in raincoats list developments of police investigations as they stand near bodies of water. I wondered which photo my family would use to look for me, what details they'd share about my appearance if I didn't return from this trip. I wondered if they'd mention how afraid I was of the water.
I thought, too, about the countless ways we shrink or fade into the backgrounds of our very own lives; the ways in which we are taken from ourselves. The countless ways women get destroyed or misplaced or lost. And the ways we manage to escape. I imagined the whole Pacific foaming before me, full of these lost women. Some tangled in seaweed, fighting to reach the surface. Others along the ocean floor as the waves gently rocked them back and forth. Others still, frozen in glaciers further north, their faces caught in screams of horror or despair. All of them held down, none of them with means to escape. I imagined some of them like Ophelia, casually floating by, grasping roses and poppies as long strands of auburn hair fan out around them. I imagined them surrounded by sharks.
In my teens and twenties I had recurring nightmares about being pulled and held down under water, with crowds of people gathered on dry land, peering at me through the ripples and murk of the pond I was submerged in. I could feel myself disappearing, the weight of the cold dark water pressing down on me and quickly filling my lungs. Sometimes I'd feel cold hands clasping my ankles, pulling me deeper and further away from life. I'd wake, choking for air, my hands pawing at my throat.
That first night at the beach house the unkind lover drank too much and told me it turned him on to make me uncomfortable during sex as he moved his hands toward my throat. I woke in the middle of the night, thirsty and cold with bruises on my collarbone and scratches on my neck. Before dawn, I dreamed of another missing girl I’d dreamed of before, the one I often imagined would be found in a red suitcase at the bottom of a river. I always imagined she looked like me.
The next morning, the rain had stopped and the silence in the vacation house was heavy, like something woolen and wet. The quiet was interrupted as the unkind lover clicked on yet another episode of Shark Week. The TV blasted out a reenactment of a teenage girl swimming near a boat when a shark suddenly began chewing her leg and pulling her under the water. As a rescue boat approached and the people on board tried to help her, she heard a loud pop as her leg came off in the shark's mouth and the rest of her body was quickly lifted aboard.
I pulled on my coat and boots and headed out the door, still imagining that sea full of lost women. I wrapped a thick green scarf around my neck. In my mind, I concocted spells I could do to keep from becoming one of them. To keep myself safe and on dry land. To keep myself from becoming a captive of the sea.
As I approached the waves, I thought I could see shark fins slicing through the foam as seagulls darted toward the sand, picking around for discarded snacks. I ran my finger along the fresh scratch on my neck and pictured my limbs inside the mouth of a Great White, being pulled further and further from shore until lifeguards and dog walkers could no longer see me. I ached to just disappear.
I shook the thought away and decided I'd make an offering to the sea witches I once read about. I hoped for safety and protection from any nearby sharks or the violent ocean herself, and I reached out, watching my offering of shiny dimes and nickels as they were swallowed by the retreating tide. I thought, again, about all of the women lost out there, women who were taken and women who had given up.
The beach was empty and as I began to turn my back to the waves, imagining falling into them and letting them take me as another sacrifice, I spotted a shark fin breaking through the roiling surface. The shark circled slowly, its fin ducking and resurfacing as the sea continued churning around it. It approached the shore and retreated, and then approached again, and I felt it luring me toward the water.
As I turned to finally leave, I noticed a figure walking down from the vacation homes and to the beach. The unkind lover, in his black wetsuit, messy hair, and yellow surfboard walked closer and closer as if in slow motion until we stood face to face on the shore. I took a breath of the cold sea air, preparing to warn him about the shark I had just spotted. I held my breath instead. I curled my toes in my boots, pressed my heels into the wet sand, feeling it crunch under my weight. He dropped the butt of his hand-rolled cigarette in front of me, pushed past, and quickly entered the water without saying a word. I could feel the shark’s hunger grow as the unkind lover began paddling out.
I walked up the hill from the beach, past the surfer market and a cluster of small green and white vacation rentals with rows of succulents and abalone shells lining their walkways. I walked further still, beyond the unkind lover’s car, parked at his family’s vacation home, then across a green and muddy cow pasture lined with eucalyptus trees. My boots were determined to sink into the thick mud but I forced them up over and over again, a newfound surge of energy pushing me along the way. I passed Elephant Rock and arrived at the highway, hopeful that a passerby would whisk me away from there.
No one would find the unkind lover for weeks, I thought. I laughed at the idea of the shark taking a bite of him and spitting him out. I imagined the shark swallowing his hands that had just wrapped around my neck, squeezing dangerously tight, a few hours before. I hoped that the shark would crush those hands beyond recognition, grinding them into more fine wet sand. I pictured the bones in his left leg or his spine washing up on the beach months later.
As I walked north on the highway, a biting wind whipped my hair into my face and I reached into my pocket. I found one last shiny dime; an offering, a medal, that I saved for myself.
about the writer: dani burlison
Dani Burlison is the editor and creator of the anthology “All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger and the Female Body,” (PM Press, 2019), and a short story collection, “Some Places Worth Leaving” (Tolsun Books, 2020). She has been a columnist at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a staff writer at a Bay Area alt-weekly, and a contributor at Ms. Magazine, The Rumpus, Yes! Magazine, Earth Island Journal, Chicago Tribune, KQED, WIRED, Utne, Shareable, and more.
Social:
Twitter: @DaniBurlison
Web: http://www.daniburlison.com
Photo Credit: Ruby Casteel
“Shark Week” will be published in Dani’s upcoming short story collection, Some Places Worth Leaving (Tolsun Books), in February 2020.
