Shark Skin

Anton remembered the shadows beneath the boat looked
like an ink spill in the water. Tenebrous tendrils
cajoled darting little fish into the gloom, luring
them with the promise of safety from oceanic
predators in their midst. The water churned as a
school of silver fish swam past him. He watched as
they wove in and out of the shifting light, before
vanishing into the murky swirling shadow.
It was too easy to lose your senses; your sense of time, your sense of direction, your sense of danger, in the vast body of water. The pageantry of fish
amused Anton like few other things. They were fast
moving patches of color, or fragile glints of silver propelled effortlessly through the depth. He lingered just out of the reach of the boats intimidating eclipse and watched until the last twinkle disappeared.
A sudden realization shook him from his reverie. The water was empty . Smaller fish had departed at once, and even large throngs of the silver fish had thinned out. Anton saw something stirring in the gloom. A mackerel. A trout. Hell a Barracuda. He didn’t give a shit what, so long as it was not a-
His mind did not have the chance to dread the
possibility. With all the seeming of a monster, it slid from it‘s hiding place.
There is a misconception about sharks and shark attacks. People believe that JAWS bursts out of the black, mouth open, and swallows it’s victims whole. Death is instantaneous. But the first bite is far more likely to wound than to kill. The mark almost never sees it coming.
Anton saw her for an instant, a single second that
seemed far longer than it should. The doctors said the shark must have been moving very fast, but she didn’t appear to move at all, rather she seemed to float towards him. Anton likened the sound to the start of an engine, but anyone who hasn’t heard the water roaring could possibly imagine what it is like.
Suspended in space, it’s image grew, and Anton
watched it’s eyes. “They won’t ever know the way it smiles,” he thought.
The teeth are so sharp you can’t feel the bite. If it wasn’t for the bump and the red, you wouldn’t know you’d been bitten at all. Anton felt the hard bump before he was engulfed in a cloud of his own blood.
As she clamped her jaws around him, Anton was already being pulled upward. The last sight he recalled was the shark vanishing like a ghost into the open ocean.
The ocean vanished as Anton’s eyes jerked open. He’d felt the pressure on his chest, a tight tearing sensation. It haunted him in the remnants of his nightmare. In his subconscious he loathed the white of the ceiling. It reminded him of the hull of the boat, the belly of the shark, anything and everything that terrified him.