The sun’s rays echoed off the water and the traffic glided easily on the Carquinez Bridge as I drove my van through early morning traffic. Suddenly liberated from a canceled temp job, I found myself with a few hours of freedom stretching before me. Movement in the water caught my eye as I glanced out into the Bay. Fins, a shiver of sharks. No lie, it’s called a shiver and no doubt, that word nails it. Great Whites, no less. Oh, they tell the tourists, those sharks don’t come into the Bay. I knew better. I stayed out of the water. Too cold, too damn dangerous. The surfers, the kayakers, the sail boating fans, they sometimes came up short. The unfortunate ones that felt a sudden jolt, penetration of teeth into bone, a furious pooling of blood and terror. I focused forward trying not to think.
Harding Park was harboring a masked tranquility when I pulled the van in for a sandwich stop. A curious mix of visitors collected there, drifting hippy youth, drum circle chanters, lovers engrossed in a moment, and those of us who needed to escape from the crappy sentence of hourly wages. I walked toward the center to pay homage to sky worshipping trees when I saw the girl sitting on a bench between two predators. She was speaking earnestly, beseeching the man on her left. The two men made eye contact. The man on the right nodded and took a hypodermic needle from his pack, extracting liquid from a vile, tapping it. He took her arm, the sinking of metal into skin, the sinking of hope into exasperation. I looked away.
The girl on the bench was jolted anew as a bolt of euphoria overtook her anxiety. She strolled away as if treading murky water as the shadows swam below. There it was, a certain attack of alpha predators, the rush of blood, the feeling of heaviness as the waves closed in, the awful whooshing sound as the soul suspends and life spills away.
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Wowwwwww, this is so dark and bone chilling Lana. Well written my friend, you took us into the dark with you. 🙂
Thank you, Debby. Yes, this is very different from things that I generally write. I originally wrote it to submit to an online speculative fiction site, but then it closed. Sadly, there are so many young people that get caught up in similar scenarios.
So true Lana. Thanks for sharing it here 🙂
A profound write, Lana… insightful.
Thank you, Iris. This is a very different thing for me to write. Sometimes, I think it is good for us to delve into things that we normally don’t write in order to stretch those muscles. I have to say, I don’t really like pieces like this one, though.
I understand, Lana. Enjoy your writing and have a great week. 🙂
As frightening as the great whites can be, the predators you’ve described in the second half are the ones we need to be afraid of even more. A dark piece that shook me to my bones, but sometimes it’s those stories that need to be told more than others.
Those are the most scariest predators, Sarah. I had a friend that witnessed such a scene once in San Francisco (they have a terrible herion problem there). It was something that stayed in my mind and haunted me. That girl is someone’s daughter, sister, friend, cousin, grand-daughter, niece. Breaks my heart.
Although I hate to admit it, there are quite a lot of places here in Berlin where you can observe the same thing. It really is heartbraking.