A CRIPPLING FEAR OF SHARKS,

ONE WEEK AFTER

TWELVE-YEAR-OLD

STEVEN CONNELLY

SLOWLY BLED TO DEATH

IN THE OCEAN

BECAUSE HIS RIGHT LEG

AND LEFT BALL WERE BITTEN OFF:

TREVOR NEWBERRY

My swimsuit slowly climbs up my clenched cheeks

as the boat slicks across the pulsing froth

through the pass from St. Andrew’s Bay to the Gulf of Mexico,

one mile, to the swimming spot

where I stand perched on the hull’s edge

wondering how the hammerhead

only got one testicle.

Water’s fine.

Dad swims a few strokes,

his sunscreen still white splotches

where he wouldn’t rub it in on his neck.

I scan the surface for dark spots circling my father,

but it’s all dark; you can’t ever see into water that deep.

And like I remember my grandfather doing when we’d swim

through the summers in cold Lake Texoma—

the bass, black as bad ideas, flitting beneath our toes—

Dad sucks the salt water into his mouth and floating on his back,

spits it out in a narrow stream.

We couldn’t have seen it coming:

the jaws swallow up around Dad,

his palms shredding into pink ribbons

from pushing out against the rows of teeth closing around his throat,

against certain death, so I dive in

and grab the son of a bitch by the gills,

screaming, You fuckin’ ate that kid’s nut, you bastard!

You’re a really crap shark,

you know that?!

You didn’t even have the courtesy

to kill him! That’s the least

you could have done! Why would you make him suffer?!

So I punch him in the dorsal and it flaps flaccid for a moment

but stands upright again, mocking me,

giving me the shark equivalent of The Finger,

and like a fat kid with a mouth full of powdered donut,

the shark replies, Say it don’t spray it. We all gotta go sometime.

And, rolling his eyes, he loosens his razor clamps

around my father,

slipping down into the deep. We paddle

to the boat and pull ourselves in. And somehow

Dad’s hands aren’t bleeding anymore, and someone wraps

a warm towel around me, and I think it looks like the black-and-white

photos of Steven Connelly, but he has two legs, and he flashes me

his balls, two, giving me the thumbs up.

Steven even pilots us home,

coursing through the peaking crests,

and everything’s okay now because none of it ever happened.

So we eat cold chicken. With hot sauce.

And pass girls in bikinis

floating in inner tubes

with tall pink drinks,

little umbrellas and citrus bobbing on top

like buoys. And when we pull in the boat, tug the line,

Dad and Stephen are nowhere to be found,

probably off dozing somewhere—

those two lazy bones never were workers—

but for a moment I see a gray slice of fin

rise above the surface and disappear,

passing back into the deep.