The Day They Put a Dead Shark
in the Water at Town Point Beach

by Cecilia Kennedy

A frozen great white shark, stolen from a laboratory, sits by the banks of Town Point Beach, which isn’t really a beach in our landlocked town—just mud and water and lots of bikini tops and ripped jean shorts. The shark’s there as a prank, still covered in frost, still with red blood at the gills and mouth, the eyes still open, the mouth closed. It got caught in a fishing net, and scientists were going to dissect it, but a group of teens got there first.

I shudder when I walk by. It’s thawing until the kids who stole it can shove it into the water, later in the day. It already glistens in the sun, the white frost on top fading, a stench already forming. More beer, more laughing, more back flips into the center of the lake. No lifeguard on duty, ever. A couple of guys crush beer cans on the shark’s nose and children ride it.

Please don’t wake the dead.

No one feels a thing for a shark, especially not a dead one. I can’t remember the first time I ever felt something for the dead. A kid in a grade behind me died in a bike accident when I was eight years old. My mother went to the funeral, came back crying. “Are you okay, honey?” she asked. Of course I was. I didn’t know him. I’d seen him but didn’t really think much about him.

I’d passed him only once, in the halls, saw him once again, laughing in the sun on the playground. Not time enough for tears.

I walk past the shark. It can’t hurt me now, but it looks as it must have when it was alive: not a thing in its head, just instinct and muscle, and my blood runs cold. I must feel something.

What’s the harm?

By 4pm, the shark’s all limp, everyone’s drunk. They put the shark into the water. People ride its back, shove it into one another, open the jaw, inspect the teeth, stick their arms inside. When a little girl pulls her arm out, a tooth comes with it, stuck in her wrist, which bleeds.

Dead things do damage.

Everyone packs up, leaves the shark in the water. Someone else will clean up the mess. But at night, when I close my eyes, I feel my stomach ache: all the dead things come to life, riding in on the wheels of a bike, the back of a shark.

Cecilia Kennedy (she/her) escaped the Ivory Tower and moved to the Greater Seattle area to explore scary-beautiful places and stories. Sometimes, she thinks she can see Bigfoot from her window. She’s scared of sharks, though.