The water is deep and black. Your mild bounces off the surfaces of rocks. A panorama of form and shadow. You hearken to your respiration—oxygen dispersing by means of your regulator. You are feeling your self suspended, cocooned, the water and your weights in equilibrium. There may be that slight sway, the ocean rocking. You understand that on the floor, the swell is fierce. That on the edge the place the sand meets the ocean, there are chunks of coral the scale of baseballs that the water will hurl in opposition to your shins. You understand that there, simply previous the waves, your life is ready for you. The best way your brother grieves. The best way your father grieves. Your mom sick once more. Her frail physique failing.
However for now, you’re past all of that. Submerged. You can nearly be floating by means of house, the blackness. The rocks: asteroids. The lights from the others: their very own particular person galaxies. You progress slowly, the water thicker in the dead of night. You observe a light-weight right into a cave, its arched ceiling, its cratered partitions. Possibly trapped now. You can not simply rise to the floor and breathe the true air. Like your mom. Not sufficient oxygen pumping by means of the physique. In need of breath, it’s referred to as. However there’s nothing small about it. The best way respiration occupies a lot of her now. There within the cave you make your changes and sink down decrease till you’re feeling your fins scrape the ocean ground. There within the cave, a flashlight gestures. You observe the beam to a ledge.
You flatten your self horizontal, head even with fins. It’s not that your mom is dying, it’s that she’s scared. She’s a lady who, traditionally, hasn’t been petrified of a lot. Sharks, she says. She’s all the time been petrified of sharks. And naturally, because of this you’re right here, 40 toes underneath, the darkish liquid casing above you. And the cave. You might be searching for them. On your mom.
And there under the ledge you discover one. A lemon shark. Its physique lengthy, glossy. A pale apparition in your mild, a creature from one other world, one other time. Historical and but fully new. For you. On your breath that catches. The shark’s slim snout protecting rows of jagged enamel. You ought to be afraid, like your mom, however you aren’t.
You are feeling a closeness. Each of you collectively underneath all that water. The best way it rests docile beneath the ledge. You may’t inform if it’s you or what its eyes are doing. Are you a menace? A disturbance?
Your mom is afraid of sharks as a result of she as soon as floated a cooler filled with meat throughout an inlet of seawater and seemed as much as see a swarming of fins. Leopard sharks. Small however all muscle and enamel. Your mom is afraid of sharks as a result of her father was. As a result of he was in Pearl Harbor. Within the water. With the tiger sharks. He noticed them rip into our bodies. Or not less than, that is what he stated.
Your mom is afraid of sharks as a result of they lurk beneath surfaces, unknown. However now it’s not the shark she fears: it’s ache.
And the lack of what she’s all the time recognized. Within the cave, you wrestle to make your self breathe. You see your air bubbles stand up above you. You look to the shark once more. Its gills opening and collapsing. You attain out to the touch it, to really feel what you understand to be sandpaper pores and skin. And it allows you to. The tough floor of its physique underneath your palm. You inhale, exhale. You are feeling it there earlier than you, alive and unafraid.
Allison Discipline Bell is a Ph.D. candidate in inventive writing on the College of Utah, and she or he holds an MFA in Inventive Writing from New Mexico State College. Her debut poetry assortment, All That Blue, is forthcoming in 2026. She can also be the creator of two chapbooks, With out Girl or Physique (poetry, Ending Line Press) and Fringe of the Sea (inventive nonfiction, CutBank Books). Allison’s prose seems or is forthcoming in Finest Small Fictions, Finest Microfiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, River Tooth, DIAGRAM, The Gettysburg Evaluation, The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Evaluation, West Department, and elsewhere. Discover her at allisonfieldbell.com.
Header photograph by joakant, courtesy Pixabay.
