She stood on the edge of the ocean, feeling it nip at her toes. The water was dark, foamy and dust brown. Fie, hell is murky, she thought. The pushing and pulling of the waves, desperate to drag her under. Yet there was no real risk. Not if she stayed where she was.
Mind, one woman had taken a selfie with a shark from the security of shore and been left with no hands to publish it with. She had wondered how this could be true, or whether it was simply misreported. How could she turn to hold the camera toward herself and the shark and have it sever her hands? Surely she would have had her back, and thus her hands, to the water. Perhaps the woman had been photographing the creature in the shallows, fingers gripping the phone, elbows locked?
Snap, snap.
But the story of a selfie was compelling. People liked to remark on the arrogance of it, the stupidity, a life reduced to a moment of wanting to be seen. Perhaps, she thought more kindly, the soon-to-be amputee had wanted to show a loved one something extraordinary, something rare.
Did she ask it to smile, hoping for the contrast between its cold grey eye and her own? Did the beast think: I warned you with my smile, you stupid cunt, but you insisted on your happy snap, and now you blame me?
She laughed at her imagined caricature, even if the anthropomorphism failed to capture the ways of sharks. Their huge black eye giving away nothing. Their caution, like any other creature. Most, anyway. She really did feel sorry for the woman.
Or maybe she didn’t at all.
Poke bears, poke sharks, poke men. It’s all the same. People know the risk, but didn’t like paying for it. For months they’d been talking about killing them all, the beautiful predators that balanced an ocean until a bigger predator arrived and unbalanced the whole fucking lot. It was our behaviour, after all, that influenced shark habits — all that post-flood detritus, washed out to sea, overfishing.
Perhaps it was justifiable hysteria, to call for action. The entire country was a disaster zone. Blame someone. Kill something. Drive cars into shopping malls in protest at over-immigration. Lock your doors.
Here, it had been endless hot rain. It was a damp that slid down her neck and under her raincoat, ran from shoulders to wrists, soaked her socks, threatened fungal infections and worse — bacterial infections and respiratory illness. Trees tore free, clay and loam and sand unravelled from their roots, and fell with the wind, crushing cars and campers who, despite warnings, pitched their tents beneath them. Bugs and bacteria bred happily in pooled water: in saucers too big for pot plants, in creekside soil where children played, in gutters clogged with leaves, in rivers as thirsty for shade as the swimmers that gathered there to escape the interminable heat.
Once, twins, floating face downward, as if looking for toys in the river. The sister with her leg amputated at the knee. It was just a cut, she said. How was I to know not to go into the creek? It was hot. So hot. And now, the necrosis. Houses precarious on the edge of crumbling cliffs. She thought of the poem Ozymandias, the king of kings once declaring the reach of his kingdom, but now: Nothing beside remains… boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.
In the south there were fires. Men went out believing it was their duty to protect their own. They inhaled the detritus of burning farmhouses, of factories exploding, of sharp soot, risking not just skin peeling from flesh but cancers years later. They knew this and still pulled on their suits, sweated inside them, heard over the radio their house had become ruins, and went back to the frontline. Sleepless, they moved through their own murky no man’s lands to rescue the homesteads of friends and strangers alike.
When their shifts ended, or they were ordered home to rest, they drove somberly past the dead. Old Ralphy from the butcher’s who hadn’t heeded his fire plan. An unnamed corpse huddled in a Tesla. It could have been the battery, they would have argued in better times, except for the blackness everywhere.
From above, her drone-self hovering over the estuary, she saw deeper blues further out mingling with the cloudy brown, evidence of the flood-ravaged inland spilling seaward. A dead platypus floated alongside logs and eskys full of beer. Boats floated like boats: dinghies, tinnies, kayaks, surfboards. A tent drifted like a jellyfish, turning lazily and tangling with the branch of an old redgum torn from its once-safe bank. A Tupperware container held an indeterminate sauce. Bolognese, perhaps. Fishing rods. Debris. The soft wreckage of life before the flood.
Below the surface, in the band between the rippled ribbon of sunlight above and the ruin of bone-white coral beneath, she was well aware the beasts hunted. Not unnatural. Not evil. Not deserving of retributive culling and its consequences. Opportunists restoring balance.
Her foot scraped rock and the shore disappeared. Blood bloomed into the murk.
It would be quick, she thought, the bite, the tearing, then the quiet. An end to rain, to fire, to the long accounting of it all.
The poem I refer to is this one by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Interesting, it appeared in the latest Frankenstein movie - the monster reads it, perhaps a judgement on his creator who does not think of the consequences in his arrogant desire to have mastery over life. I was thinking about this poem for weeks, and often think of it, those ruins in the desert and the long gone kingdom. Ozymandias, the arrogant king, believing he controlled everything, but erased by time and nature. He speaks of how futile it is to declare in the face of systems way bigger than us. The woman desiring the selfie believes she has mastery, her camera a shield, but of course the proximity of nature says otherwise. Any call to kill sharks in response (there were four attacks in Sydney this week, one fatal) seems to echo the inscription on his statues: it's this kind of reactionary dominance, shouting against forces that don't listen, and of course, have knock on effects - kill the sharks, and everything else goes off kilter. The disasters in my story - the flood, fires, erosion, the necrotic flesh after the bacteria in the river seeps in through an open wound are the 'lone and level sands' - a kind of aloof, indifference consequence. I didn't mean the final act to be about defeat, but just another human choice inside the much larger picture.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
