On Great White Shark

January 31st
Ironically, I lost two legs looking for the Great White Shark. Just like Jaws.

On GREAT WHITE SHARK
I was lounging poolside at a posh Miami resort, sunglasses on and a spicy novel lying on my lap, which I had just put down because I was falling asleep. My head lolled to the left and a Great White Shark was lounging in the chair beside me. He had his fins up behind his head – it was clear he was relaxing. He smiled at me, not at all self-conscious about showing me all three rows of his gross, bloody teeth. There were some bits of flesh still stuck in between his serrated chompers, and he reached up to his mouth and picked out a particularly large morsel as he addressed me.
“Hey, have you been watching that show, Lost?” he asked. I said nothing, but turned on my side to face him, intrigued.
“Fantastic show. I know a lot of people who gave up on it in the second season, when it started getting weird, but for me, that’s when it started getting good. Now I can’t get enough of it. Turns out it’s all about time travel!” He took a sip of his Caesar that he had by his deck chair.
“Yeah, a brother of mine lives up near Hawaii, that where they film it, he’s into it even more than I am. Now I like to be surprised, I don’t want to know anything ahead of time, but my brother, he’s always peeping in on the set, seeing what they’re shooting. He tries to tell me what’s coming up and I tell him no way!” The shark shook his head exaggeratedly and put his fins out in the universal sign for ‘I want no part of this conversation!’
“He doesn’t get a complete picture of what’s going on anyway,” the shark continued. “Still, I hate it when people try and spoil it for you like that. Who cares? Watch the damn show!” The shark smiled and shook his head in disbelief that people could ruin their own enjoyment.
“Yeah this is a good place to relax. What are you reading there?” I noticed that the shark was wearing sunglasses, but from my perspective it looked like he was wearing them on the back of his head, where his eyes were. He had been looking at me with just one eye, which was shielded by a reflective lens, which was attached by a thin wire to his other eye, which was on the other side of his head that I couldn’t see. The arms of the glasses were taped to his body with scotch tape, because he had no ears. If you had told me that an anthropomorphic shark was wearing sunglasses, that would have made sense to me, but in execution it was depressingly awkward. Still, it must have reduced the glare.
I showed him the cover of my book.
“John Grisham, eh? Can’t beat him for lawyer shit,” he laughed. “Naw, I like that stuff too. Guilty pleasure. I should be reading War and Peace or something, if I wanted to improve myself, but who has time for that? On a hot day like today, you want to just relax and let the writer take you where he wants you to go.”
My eyes fluttered a bit, as the sun was making me drowsy.
“I’m not keeping you up, am I?” asked the shark. “Ah, don’t worry about it. I don’t mind. I’m getting a bit sleepy myself. I reckon I’ve got about an hour before I got to get back to work. Just enough time for a little shuteye.”
At that point I drifted off. I woke up an hour later, a little sunburnt. The shark was gone, his empty glass still on his side table with a celery stalk resting inside. ‘That’s Miami!’ I thought to myself, and chuckled.