by Elissa Field

The sky had cleared out over the Gulf and we leaned, each of us, on the most useless tools we could find. Green-handled broom from the kitchen. Soft-tined rake. Skin-slashing wire brush to the grill. Spade for potting begonias. That hammer-knife for whacking open a windshield whenever the day came you’d drive off the road and into a canal, no matter how obviously it seemed to be the wrong thing to do.

Because these things happen, as we know from the news. A body dug from a rusted Pinto in a river in Georgia, been missing fifty years, his parents died in their nineties never having stopped the search. A man snapped his neck diving into four feet of water, no matter the picture stenciled every twelve feet around the pool’s edge – every pool, everywhere we’d ever been – had so clearly said not to. A man tattooed with the tree-roots-stain of every one of his veins having been lit up by electrocution when he was struck by lightning, continuing his walk in a storm, no matter that had been each of our parents’ earliest admonitions to us: come in out of the rain. No matter our own skeletons had quaked with the terror of thunder – hadn’t they – from the time we first swam from the womb?

But here we were, lost. The six of us. Armed like children playing knights errant with our useless weapons, our sweat-stuck t-shirts, our flipflop armored feet. At the bottom of our grandmother’s garden, backing up to the surge-torn bay. We had boozed through the hurricane, although we’d been told to flee. Breathed exhaust from the generator, although we’d been warned to keep it outside. Now drank the snarling mockery of the sun, its heatbladed arms beating our shoulders with the fire of “I told you so.” As we eyed the thing we couldn’t believe. Gasping there, so lovely. Garlanded with bromeliads, baubled with mangos, in a bed of wind-shredded palm. Its black death eyes dazzling in sorrow.

Tiger, one argued. Bull, said another. Great white, said the youngest, who was, in truth, hopeful that he was right. Because wouldn’t that be a thing – even if it were dead, even as we were here to cut it up, get it into the bin, dispose of it before it smelled – to be able to say that we had beheld – touched even with our toes, our fingertips, taken selfies with – an actual great white right here in the garden?

It is a nurse shark, the quietest of us said, and we knew she was right. Had known it ourselves. Heard it as if in chapel. As if damnation. As if we’d killed it ourselves.

One of us hissed, as if this were prescriptive, Global warming! Another murmured, All the plastics in the ocean. One of us was self-righteous and adjusted the blue bracelet she wore that was testament to the contribution she’d made to ocean cleanup.

We could save it, said the one who’d known it was a nurse.

There was a long silence. Filled with chain saws and generators and neighbors cursing the tree that had dented their car, the sand that had mucked up their walk.

One of us tentatively slid a grilling spatula under what kindergarten would have taught us was the shark’s belly but we were sure had a more zoologically correct term. Lifted. Just enough to bend the spatula. To elicit a pained slow desperate entirely relatable effort at life at begging at begging please don’t do that again from the soft brown head of the giant beast that lay deflated with landlocked gravity at our feet.

Fucking heavy, said that one, pissed to be down a spatula, ferreting around for a stick in the muck.

Not how you do it. How would you do it? Who do we call? No one’s going to come. Where would you put it? Not like it’s going in the tub. In the car? The car’s fucked.

You’re not even trying.

There was a long silence.

Somewhere, someone had fired up a grill, the smell of meat searing. Somewhere, someone had plugged a stereo into their generator, the music not good, too loud. Figures, doesn’t it? One of us said. The ones who turn it up loud always have the worst taste.

The shark gasped once, twice, wanted to tell us she agreed. On the reef, there had always been that one. The one who loved to brush just close enough to a swimmer’s leg to elicit that cloud of pee, that scream that blocked out seagulls, blocked out the trickle of shells in the surf, blocked out the soft hum of engines, the splash of a fish at the surface, the song of a whale, the rumble of a storm vibrating just at the edge of the horizon.

It takes a blanket, said the one who lectured the rest about how Sea World transported dolphins and manatees and prop-gashed leatherbacks. A blanket, yes, the jagged teeth agreed. And we looked at each other, mulling slow. Not sure where a blanket might be found.