by Aaron Dries
She heard another noise too. It was impossible to miss.
A long, drawn-out musical note.
It occurred to her that she’d heard it many times in this feeding ground, even back when there were still threads tying the shark to the woman who cried when she was alone, who hid secrets in a handbag behind the crawlspace in the hope that someone would find it and end her life.
The sound was lyrical. Hollow. Now that she was closer, she realized it wasn’t a single note at all. In fact, it was thousands—a chorus blending together to form a single lament.
Were the mountains weeping in awe of her hunger?
No.
Was it coming from the food?
The shark didn’t think so.
The only sounds the food made were screams.
They always screamed, didn’t they? The knowledge that they were going to be consumed stripped them of whatever lives and personalities and problems they thought defined them out there in the world. What was left behind was raw and ready for her teeth. The shark made everything equal. Ground zero.
She didn’t know how many people she’d taken. Once, she had. Long ago. Some images remained.
Grains of rice floating from a girl’s slit-open stomach. The crushed face of a child she’d slaughtered with a piece of broken brick.
No.
Not a face. A wound.
She’d worn Christmas lights to dazzle them. Used cunning to earn their trust. She’d spun lies to gain access. In between were stamps on a visa, the pages bleeding.
So many people, and yes, they did all looked the same on the inside. Split open like rotten fruit, and every bit as sweet. But that wasn’t even the good part. It was the light she sought out; it illuminated all of that underwater darkness.
And the girl up ahead burned bright. Oh, did she ever.
The shark gained some ground and snatched glimpses of her through the sway and swish of trees. But now the girl looked different. It was a man. He seemed familiar—
(A lifting veil reveals the smiling face. There are tears building in his eyes. He is lightly freckled. He burns in the sun during the summer. She makes fun of him for this. He loves her. He makes love to her. He has something to do with why this happened. An agony in her body.)
—but she couldn’t say why.
The shark was wrong. It wasn’t a man. It was a teenage girl with purple streaks in her hair.
(“What’s wrong with you? You weren’t always like this. What changed? You’re all fucked up in the head; you know that, right?”
“Don’t you dare talk to your mother like that.”
“Oh, please. Dad, you’re the biggest pushover of them all. Everyone says so. Even the kids at school think it. She’s losing it and you’re letting her. You’re afraid of her. Admit it.”
“Go to your room. Now. You stay another bloody minute and you’ll live to regret it for the rest of your life.”
“Dad, you’re spineless. She’s leaving you. Us—”)
A flash of leaves and the person changed again. This stranger is not so strange. Again, the shark finds a likeness in the dark, wavy hair, the long white face.
(She glares at her reflection in the mirror and struggles to see a resemblance between the person staring back at her and the person she always assumed she was. This person’s hair was falling out in clumps (it began with a hairbrush coiled with silvery strands); her eyes were darker and one pupil was larger than the other. The reflection looked as though it were nothing more than a skeleton dipped in wax.
Susan takes herself and her reflection to her local bulk billing medical center. She catches sight of it in the sliding door. There are gaps in her teeth. So much rot. It stinks. She stinks. Especially when she sweats, when she has her period.
The receptionist calls out her name.
The doctor is a thin man with a lisp. She watches his face begin to smear, the expressions and definitions blurring into one, like Dick Van Dyke’s pastel street paintings in Mary Poppins (a film her children loved when they were little), running in the rain.
Her headache makes the walls of the medical center crack open. Water floods in. Health brochures with titles like TODAY’S CHECKUP IS TOMORROW’S HEALING rise with the tide, all of the happy faces in the photographs turning to mush.
There is a shadow over her back. It has come for her again—)
The woman is the girl again. Her light is so bright it almost hurts to look at.
The shark salivated; pinkish threads trailed across her chin. Her left arm was lifeless, more distraction than anything else. She wished she had the time to chew it off, running with the red rainbow.
It would terrify the girl. Fear makes them burns brighter, and they burn brightest just before they’re wiped out. I’m gonna make it last. I’m gonna make it last re-eeeeaaaaalll good. You’re special. You’re Christmas and Easter and birthdays all a-rolled into one. You’re mine.
Mine.
7
Amity couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The jungle was thinning up ahead.
Her excitement expressed itself in the quickening of her pace. There was salt everywhere; it was even beginning to sting her eyes. She refused to close them. No. Closing them would yank the foundation out from under the hope she was building inside her.
That couldn’t happen. Not this close.
It looked like a bomb crater, or one of those meteorite landing sites she’d seen on television. The land was scooped out, yet shallow. There were no trees in this valley, just raw soil. She wondered if a fire had ripped through this place, but wasn’t convinced. She’d seen enough fires around Evans Head—controlled backburning or sugarcane leveling—to know that even scorched earth gave birth to new shoots of green regrowth. White flowers against the black.
There was none of that. Life was too afraid to grow here.
My God.
There were hundreds of old glass and plastic bottles stabbed base-first into that soil. They covered the entire valley. It looked like an illustration in a kid’s fantasy book, a picture of a king’s treasure, which she knew was usually guarded by dragons.
The bottles were every shade of green, blue and clear glass. The ones closest to the center of the valley were older, while the less grimy ones edged right to the end of the path she was heading down. And yes, it was a path; Amity hadn’t realized it until now.
This part of the island had been landscaped. Just knowing this made her feel lighter.
There would be men leaning on their shovels enjoying a break. They would turn around to face her. Their faces would be kind and strong, as would be their arms. One of them would have a gun, which would be used to slay the dragon.
Wait a minute. What is this place? Some kind of art installation out in the middle of fucking nowhere? Don’t fucking think so.
A memorial?
Nope. Please try again.
There were no answers, except for one. She knew where all of the bottles had come from.
Tourists.
The monkeys had approached them, week after week, year after year, and had taken their shiny, sweet offerings. And after they had fed—the sugar giving them that much-needed buzz—they had taken the bottles with them. Amity was sure she’d actually seen some of them carrying the bottles, wrapped in their tails, as they leaped from branch to branch. Tokens.
Each bottle was filled with varying heights of rainwater. Every one was unique, these gifts from the men who piloted the boats.
No, not gifts.
Amity’s stomach constricted on itself.
A means of trade.
Here, take this sweet. Enjoy it, and in return let us walk along your beach. You’ll like the drink, all right. See, I ain’t lyin’, little monkey. It’s sugary and full of bubbles. Tickles your throat, dontchit? And guess what? We’ll come back with more, multiple times a week if you’ll let us. See, this is a great deal for you and all your little friends. Why, you won’t ever have to hunt for food or water again! We’ll give it to you
over and over until you forget how to pick your own fruit, how to drink water from puddles.
Aren’t they shiny, the bottles? You can keep them if you like, a little reminder of who we are…
…and how much we own you.
Amity was so close to it all. She did not make it. Her foot landed on the edge of a hole and she began to slide along the muddy decline.
Everything tilted sideways.
“No!”
It wasn’t a hole, just a half-dug pit of five feet’s depth. The sides were slick with crushed, veinlike roots. Amity grabbed at the earth, but there was nothing there to hold on to. Her fingers raked rows of finger tracks through the grime. She hit the bottom, her shorts having ridden up around her crotch. There was mud on her tongue, grit between her teeth.
Flies filled the air. Tiny wings brushing, brushing. They crisscrossed in front of her, weaving insane routes through the stinking air.
The stink of shit. Grease. Unwashed skin. Infection.
Amity’s foot was flat against a young woman’s face, the tip of her toes resting on the upper lip. A worm crept through the eyeball, exposing the pool of pus it had been swimming in. Where her lower jaw should have been, there were only flies. There were leaves and twigs through her hair, as though she’d been dragged a mile. And of course she had been. There was sand in her nostrils, clutched in her hand.
This corpse was not alone. There were others.
A death pit.
Amity saw the twisted hands. The exposed knees raked with cuts. The ripped-apart faces obscured by inky rainwater. Their flesh was cold and hard beneath her.
Water and bile fought its way up Amity’s throat. She began to scramble at the pit’s walls, but they were slippery. Revulsion made her weak. She slid onto all fours, squealed. Every time she shuffled off someone’s chest, she accidentally pressed against someone’s exposed brains.
A shadow fell over them all.
8
The shark was on her hands and knees, crawling to the edge of the pit. Her ears were filled with the sound of hundreds of bottles tooting in the wind. This was the sound she’d been hearing.
It was empty music, and this emptiness was like that of an abandoned house on a run down street. The kind of emptiness that passing children fill with stories of mystery as a way of culling the unease the absence of life evokes. It was the sound of the haunted, and it was now reaching out to cut the energy from the shark’s body. Its singular pitch made the base of her neck throb, as though the children had gifted their fictional ghost with a fictional dagger, and was forcing it between her vertebrae.
But the shark had no choice. The blade had to be ignored. So she peered over the edge of the pit instead. Focused. Blocked all else out. The girl she’d been chasing sat down there on a throne of corpses. There were flies everywhere, a haze of black static.
She watched the girl’s light, just beneath the skin, so bright every freckle was projected on the pit’s walls. It was stunning to look at, and even though the shark’s face had been torn to ribbons, making a smile near impossible, she could still appreciate beauty. And humor, too. A giggle escaped. It was funny how the girl was trying to escape all of that blood, trying to untangle herself from coils of busted intestine.
“I…see…you,” the shark said.
She raised her hand, leaving behind a perfectly formed print in the mud. Shaking fingers framed the pale face below.
Click.
Bones cracked as she stretched farther, dragging her empty breasts across the jagged roots. Her giggle was gone; there was only roaring. A tooth tumbled out of her mouth.
Gonna make it last rea-aaaaaalllll good.
The girl was still. All of her color had drained away, making her blood seem much brighter than it was. Her eyes were coals pushed into a snowman’s face. Cold. Wide. They no longer seemed to blink.
The shark could see that there was little fight left in her, just a savage stare.
“Whaa ugh euew chashin?” the girl asked.
The shark withdrew her hand a little. Wavered.
Brightness shone from the girl’s mouth and eyes with each slurred word. Her light was no longer white, but vivid blue. The hottest and most pure of flames. The shark could feel the heat from where she lay.
“Whaa ugh euew chashin?” the girl asked again. Even though the words were difficult to decipher, the shark knew it was a question by the way it was spoken. The voice—fragile and sweetly pitched, honeyed in its own raspy way.
“Whaa ugh euew chashin?”
The woman who used to be Susan Sycamore cocked her head.
What are you chasing?
She didn’t care. And that was the point.
I. Just. Don’t. Care.
Hands grabbed the shark by the shoulders. She felt herself being lifted up; the pit slid from view. Trees flashed by—a swirl of green and gray. Raging sunlight. The island’s song continued to howl. She landed facedown at the foot of the glass bottle valley.
9
The last son was hurricane-strong, and the island watched him display his power. It parted the fog, allowing more illumination over the scene. Each shadow revealed was a testament, slashes of dark pride over her soil.
He was not weak as the others had been.
Winds whipped the trees into leathery claps, a thrum of applause.
The island watched as the monster he’d pulled from the edge of the pit—where he’d thrown the bodies before dawn—landed at the threshold to the clearing. Flesh thumped against sand. Drops of blood on the bottles.
The last son shook his head, dreadlocks flailing in an echo of his movements. It looked like he was trying to shake off his weakness, a weakness that was as well-defined in him as the scars of discipline beneath the patchwork shirt.
10
The shark lifted her face from the sand. The man who had thrown her was just out of sight. He was roaring, just as she had roared. Only it was a more primal cry.
For the first time since that bird—a flash of feathers and yellow beak—had shot out of nowhere and snipped one half of her sight into blackness, she sensed the narrowness of her vision and felt pain bashing around inside her skull. Yet it wasn’t just that.
She was beginning to feel afraid.
And it wasn’t the kind of fear a kid experiences when Mom or Dad switches off the bedroom light and all the shadows in the bedroom look like people in waiting. It wasn’t that uniquely adult fear of change, either—of having to switch careers and lifestyles, or accept that the special someone in your life doesn’t love you in the special way he or she once did.
No. This fear was more sincere. It was elemental.
It was the fear of dying. She imagined that being born could be the only thing that equaled this—the collapsing of a world, blinding light, the hands of giants.
Susan Sycamore suspected she would be leaving this world the same way she had come into it: screaming.
The man’s roar had the shape of a word, but it was unlike any she’d ever heard. That wasn’t to say she didn’t understand its connotation. It was a command through and through, and it split the air with all the force of an arrow—only she was not the intended target.
Susan floundered on her stomach and watched as the monkeys came spilling from the trees around the clearing. Every thump of clawed hand and foot threw up explosions of sand. She saw their little pink faces dancing, their mouths full of junkie-needle teeth. Some of the monkeys were deformed—snouts run into eye sockets, ears webbed with furry neck. They looked like toys after the child had grown bored and added a little fire to their playtime. Susan had done this herself, as had her own kids, whose names she could no longer remember.
I don’t know if I ever did.
The animals came at her from every direction. They screeched and chattered as they leaped over the bottles, bounding with great speed.
She tried to command her arms to move. They wouldn’t. Her legs were leaden. The wiring between her brain and body had been severed. Pan
ic molded with pain, making hot piss squirt down her thighs.
The shark in the mirror opened its mouth and words spilled out. You’ve got to get up. Get up now and fight.
They were closer. It was impossible to tell how many of them there were, though Susan guessed the tally would number the bottles one for one. On every monkey’s manic face she saw something recognizable.
Hunger.
Their black eyes seared the air, charred her wounds.
Hurt. It contorted her expressions into those she’d seen on her victims time and time again. The widening eyes as they filled with the knowledge that they would soon be dead; a laughterless Joker’s smile. And, of course, there was the twitching.
Nerves firing. Joints constricting. It was the body’s way of reminding the brain that it was still alive, goddammit it!
Susan knew that the monkeys could see the lights she’d collected, swirling around in her system. They were reflected in their peepers.
The man continued to roar from behind her, animating the animals even more. They squealed back in reply.
Susan grabbed the nearest Coke bottle.
“Come at me, you clever fucks!”
She hefted it as high as she could, which wasn’t very far at all. Rainwater ran over her wrist. She drew her left knee up under her stomach and briefly saw all of her blood absorbed into the sand.
The wind screeched the bottles into screams as the animals closed in. Susan could smell their musk as they shat with excitement. There was a terrible choreography to the way they moved.
Depraved grace.
The monkey in the lead was dressed in the remnants of a pink tutu and its cheeks were rouged with layers of cracked, red earth. There was a broken bottle in its hand, glimmering shards pointing outward like a knife. Rubbery lips pulled back. Its gums were black. Rotten teeth glimmered.
“You can’t have me!”
Her heart was beating so fast and hard she thought it might literally clam up and give in. She had stopped moving, and as anyone knew, no shark could survive without the sea rushing through its gills. To do otherwise was to die.
