The Shark

I went to the beach, and it seemed like everyone was fishing that morning. The waves were rough, rolling into one another without stop. There was a  storm on the horizon, and the rough waves brought in more fish. But these waves didn’t only bring in regular fish—they also brought with them a shark. A small hammerhead shark. Sphyrna Mokarran. The great hammerhead. On this day, the storms were coming in, fishers cast their lines, and the small but great hammerhead perused the bottom of the Atlantic, right off of the 81.3∘ West longitude meridian, and found what he thought was a delicious meal. As he sunk his teeth into the piece of fish, the hook entered the roof of his mouth. Despite his pulling and shaking and fighting with every bone in his body, he could not fight back against the hook, and his small and tired body was pulled upon the shore against his will. As he was reeled in, people crowded around him. A shark? In these waters? It’s not often you see a hammerhead in particular. It’s so small. Predator—now the prey. It can’t fight back! Quick! Take it off the hook! Let me see it!

While the man who actually caught the shark hesitated to hand it over to the man walking the poodle on the beach, his persistence eventually wore him down. He handed the shark over to the man walking the poodle, who got in the fisherman's face and begged for the shark as soon as he saw it hanging from the hook. The fisherman shifted his feet in the sand, looked at the shark and then at the man with the poodle, and eventually nodded his head. The poodle man squeezed the shark hard, and with the poodle in one hand, unhooked the shark and ran over to a woman in a red bikini. He screamed and flailed and tried to scare her with the shark. He waved it around, making roaring sounds and jumping. But the shark doesn’t roar or jump. The shark is quiet, with quick bursts of muscle sending it off in directions of food. It senses quietly, using its sense of smell and instinct to guide it. The shark doesn’t attempt to make people laugh or flirt with the lady in the red bikini. He simply tries to live. The shark is small, and he sits in the squeeze of this man’s hand, being shaken and broken and suffocating, his gills begging for water and his body going into shock. He isn’t dead yet, but he is on his way to death's door.

The fisherman is gone—he is sitting back on his beach chair. He has packed up his line. He’s done fishing for the day. The jumping screaming poodle man has now annoyed the lady in the red bikini, so the shark has nothing more to offer him. He throws him into the shallow water. The shark is shocked by the impact—the tide is coming in and the water is shallow for a few feet out. As the impact hits the shark, he tries to regain his senses, his gills pumping water as fast as they can to revitalize him and send him back into the sea. But above him, beyond the water, the man with many kids who witnessed this whole event has decided he wants his kids to see the shark too. The shark is His to show, and He will make sure His precious children get to see the shark too. So as the shark is regaining its strength and the shock wears off, the man with many kids grabs him right out of the shallow water. He squeezed him even tighter than the fisherman, who had a light hold, even tighter than the man with the poodle who jumped around and screamed. He holds him even tighter because now this is His shark that He caught and He is now a man with a rare hammerhead shark and His kids will now know how incredible and strong their father is. Their dad caught a shark, a small helpless, incapacitated shark, a shark who belonged to the ocean and was weakened and not powerful enough to fight his hooked meal and now facing death, with His bare hands. But it was not an even fight. The man with many kids squeezed the shark, and the shark stopped feeling pain and stopped trying to fight as it was lifted into the suffocating air another time. This time the shark went limp, and he didn’t need to be squeezed as hard, but he was squeezed even harder and he was limp and the world got very quiet for the shark. The shark's black, searching eye turned duller, darker. The Man decided this was the small hammerhead shark's last day in the ocean. He decided this creature's purpose would be divinely created in his own round hands. 

The man with many kids took photo after photo of his kids with the shark. The children could easily pick it up and pose with it like They Caught It! They Conquered the Great Beast of The Sea! They Are Strong and Powerful Just Like Their Dad! The lifeless shark was held outward like a prize, from his tail to show his length, and upside down to show their strength. Each new pose brought another photo for each child. The shark did not smile, he did not pose. After the photos were taken and the captions for the posts had been thought of and then man with many kids was no longer interested in the baby hammerhead shark, it was too long out of the water. The shark did not make it through his second round of being a prize unfairly won. He didn’t even make it through being snatched from the water a second time. The shark’s limp body hung in the hands of the man with many children, but despite the sharks’ slack stature, the man sat in the shallow water with his many children and tried to pretend the shark would perk up again and swim away. When it didn’t work for the first or second time, the man with many children went further into the water and pretended to release the now dead hammerhead shark into the sea. The shark’s gills did not fill with water, his strong body didn’t propel him further into the sea, he did not recover from the shock. Instead he laid limp, upside down, floating between the push and pull of the waves, his death being for nothing more than a photo and a boast. The waste, the cruelty, and the injustice of his death tainting the water, while the birds above send shadows over his body and the crabs below pick away at his flesh, the low sorrowful  rumble of the angry sea being heard throughout the current of the riptides.