submit to the sharks
THE SHARK WAS STUBBORN & THEY BOTH STARVED
BY TAO LIN

 
When I was four, I went on a cruise with my brother to Bermuda.

My brother was old.  He was twenty-four.

One day, on the cruise, we were on the top deck.

"Where are my parents?" I said to my brother.  "I'm supposed to have one mom and one dad?  Mommy and Daddy?"

He stared at me for a very long time.  He was thinking, I could tell.

Then he picked me up and threw me into the ocean.

I didn't scream.  I thought that it must've been something reasonable and pragmatic, to be thrown off of a cruise ship.

I was raised by dolphins.

Fifteen years later, I found my brother.  This was in America.  I found him and I punched him in the face so hard that he went immediately blind.

There wasn't any blood.  But the blindness was irreversible and it happened instantly.

I stayed around to see what he'd do.

"Is this even fair?" he said.  "You were raised by dolphins, but now I can't even move freely through this world where colors and shapes and facial expressions are so important, crucial, really."

"I liked being raised by dolphins," I said.

I stayed around some more.  I wanted him to say, "Things are going to be okay.  People love you."  I wanted him to say the names of these people, and I wanted that never to end.

But he didn't say anything.  He was moving his hands in front of him, feeling for things.

"Hey," I said.  "I liked being raised by dolphins."

He came toward me, his arms out in front.

I felt so sad then suddenly and felt I was going to cry.  Things felt wrong.  Everything was wrong.  I moved toward him and we embraced.

Then he started strangling me.  I reached behind me and picked up a knife that was lying there on a table and I stabbed him in the center of his heart.

I took his corpse and dove into the ocean.  Because of being raised by dolphins, I could breathe underwater and also could dive really deep without rupturing my lungs.

So I dove to the very bottom of the Pacific Ocean and stuffed my brother's corpse in a crevice in the Marianas Trench.

I stayed there and looked at his corpse.

It slowly became unjammed, and then floated up.  A shark came by and ate it.

"Shark," I said.  "Eat me."  I spoke in a language the dolphins had taught me.  "I know you hear me, shark.  Hey!"

I swam at it, but it wouldn't eat me.  I pushed myself at its mouth.  It was very annoyed at me, but it kept its mouth shut very tight and kept turning away.  But I wasn't going to give up.  I held on tight to its mouth and shoved my fingers in.  I felt some teeth.  "Hey, shark," I said.  "I'm holding on for the rest of my life and you'll have to open up some day."
 


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