Bunny and Shark

bunny and shark

FIRST EDITION

Copyright © Alisha Piercy, 2014

The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts and The Ontario Arts Council.

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Piercy, Alisha, 1972–, author

Bunny and shark / Alisha Piercy. -- First edition.

(Department of narrative studies)

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77166-062-4 (html)

I. Title. II. Series: Department of narrative studies

PS8631.I4728B86 2014     C813'.6     C2014-904783-5

PRINTED IN CANADA

bunny

and

shark

ALISHA PIERCY

BOOKTHUG

DEPARTMENT OF NARRATIVE STUDIES

TORONTO, MMXIV

About This Book

From award-winning author Alisha Piercy comes
Bunny and Shark
, a middle-aged coming-of-age story-cum-shark-adventure that reveals and celebrates women's power in the trenches. Plunging into the first thirteen days after the ‘bastard' pushes his ex-Playboy wife ‘Bunny' over a cliff in the Caribbean,
Bunny and Shark
is a fable about island survival, and the perils and potentials of being exiled from one's identity.

Literally lost at sea, Bunny is fueled by the miracle of having been saved from sharks by a band of dolphins. And her continued survival depends on her ability to become a spiritual extension of the landscape: she is the mood of the ocean at night as she swims blindly in it, and the protective coolness of the jungle by day as she recovers from a loss of limb; the close-walled refuge of the sailboats anchored in the harbour, and the sparkling deck of an opulent superyacht when, transformed, she makes a triumphant return to her former world.

Introducing one of the great heroines of contemporary fiction,
Bunny and Shark
takes readers on a voyage intense with abandon and illumination, in a story that invokes more than a little bit of magic in the telling.

Contents

Prelude

Day one dead

Day two dead

Day three dead

Day four dead

Day five dead

Day six dead

Day seven dead

Day eight dead

Day nine dead

Day ten dead

Day eleven dead

Day twelve dead

Day thirteen dead

About the Author

Prelude

S
HE LISTENS TO THE SOUND
of another mouth breathing fast. As if running. “Who is this? How did you get my number?” She butts out her cigarette so she can hold the phone with both hands.

“Hello?” And pulls the receiver away from her ear because on the other end, somewhere out there in the lowlands, where the wind has that particular note of heave, the other phone hits the ground with a crash.

She puts the receiver down on the table and stares at the mouthpiece leading to the dull, beige cord as it dangles and bobs out from the wall. She is transfixed by the disappearance of the caller's voice: a woman whose words slur together into a whisper for help. The tiny black holes spit distant sounds of rocks cracking and then a yell. Now a man's voice. Jablonsky wonders if she should hang up and press *69. Or call the police. But to say what? Her eyes flit from the silent, resting phone to her impotent reflection on the black patio window. She is waiting for the woman to come back to the phone to tell her what to do. But no one speaks.

She picks it up again and winds the curling cord around her fingers. Where, exactly, is this happening? She stops everything, every move, and lets the house settle around her. She tunes in and hears waves crashing. But that sound could be coming from her own balcony, the sea is everywhere when you're on an island. Jablonsky circles her kitchen twice, aware of herself, safe and sound in her mountainside villa, far from the panic of feet skidding down rocks and into the sands of the difficult lowland terrain.

From across the room she yells: “Hello? Are you there?” On the other end, and what she doesn't perceive: an intake of breath, as if in surprise. Not the woman. The phone goes dead.

/ / /

You fall. Clumsy-bodied, running through the air, as if there might actually be some place to go other than over the cliff and into the sea.

Your clothes puff out, a sandal falls, and you enter the sea. You kick off the other shoe underwater and grasp at the surface. At whatever end is up in all that deep, green blackness. The night is dark but there is a sliver of moon.

“You bastard!” you scream, but it's smothered by water. Your face pushes to the surface, ragged and salted. And it occurs to you where you are, and what you've been thrown to.

You scream unstifled this time. Through the black eye he dealt you, you see him in double and fuzzy. Above, unsteady on the rocks, his white shirt blowing and his knife hung low at his side, slicing its way towards you as if you are still in front of him. Falling to his knees, terrified, he is making his way to the edge. He looks over it, afraid. That now you might not die.

Swim out of this, swim away. Or go deeply underwater. You aren't sure because no matter what you do, he's up so high, he'll see you doing it.

The horror dawns on you of having been dropped into the sea where it pushes at a right angle to the wall of cliff. Striations of brown-black rock run in endless lines all leading upwards to the bastard who won't help you. The stern sweep back down to the dark surface of sea conceals so many ways you could now die. You cry out in one final burst: “Help me!” Then you thrash for murder, carving the sea with all your limbs. Your clothes claw at you. Your face bleeds in aimless strings. You scream and whine and choke, then beg softly, your mouth going underwater, speaking halfway into the sea. You give the bastard your swan song.

Then you rest, blowing bubbles.

Don't breathe so hard, you tell yourself. No more bubbles. Go softer. Go still. Count to ten. And sink slowly under.

For some reason, being underwater makes everything stop. You feel the quiet of airless entombment. Like you are caked in warm wax.

You pray he believes it.

Swim as hard as you can in any direction deep underwater. Hold your breath. Longer, if possible, then crouch. Your arms paddle at your sides to stop you from floating up through the surface. You come up anyhow, fighting primal urges: don't choke or gasp for air. Don't see me, please don't see me. Just barely holding. Above: the see-through wall of water. Your mouth: punched and swollen but somehow controllable, shapes itself to the surface to breathe through a straw-sized O. Salt-stings as you stare through the two-inch film of green ocean glaze to see if he still sees you. You hope you seem dead. Your breath shallows to nothing as the bastard turns into a ripple of white on the cliff, looking, squinting to see, the rocks skidding under him and spilling over the edge. Play dead. Don't corpses go dead-man's-float? he'll be thinking. He won't be sure.

So you play dead for him, one last performance, lolling up and over like a seal to give him his final picture. You wait for the sound of his car. You wait for it to rear up and burn away over the lowlands.

God love him at least for believing in the myth and efficacy of the island's shark pit.

/ / /

Their noses butt upward under the bright night waves. They make splashy peaks. Fierce, almost glittery: we've arrived! Startled, you hack and swallow water. You look from side to side. Flashes of shiny grey in every direction. They slow down to a thudding, a dissonant shark-timing of drive-bys, seemingly not yet ready to kill. Yes: to kill you! Torpedo lurches. A thunderbolt lunge that bumps you, hurts you. Then below, in dull ominous skin, tunnelling one by one.

Cold now. Getting tired already. The sharks' fins and tails lash about in a front line that arcs wide to encircle you. Their loud slap on the water. You raise your head. I hear you, I hear you, you say to the bottom of the ocean. Their position shifts, they get closer. Just how many are there? What's needed to kill one woman? Reconfiguring, looting without actually touching. Maybe it's not you they prey on. Or they're teasing their way towards a gradual kill. You count to five, shut your eyes. Open them. See hundreds. Or so it seems. Whitecaps and moonlight mix up light with action. Was that slap the signal to attack?

Tearing your good eye away from them is next to impossible. They require that you observe every painstaking move they make. But for a second you turn to see the edge of the cliff. Could the bastard have had a heart, and turned back to hoist you out of all this?

The whole mass of ocean rising and falling, shifting you and the circle from one full sea depth high, to low, then to high again.

Something in the tone shifts from menace to release. Heavy eyelids, you let your lashes fall into your cheeks where they congeal with the blood.

Salt-choked whisper: a way out? Give into it? Give in to death and maybe it'll hurt less?

Moments before you knew he would push you over the edge, the same silent plea was cast out of your mouth like a shot. You would have been a silhouette standing there, shivering against the sea, as he backed away holding his knife. He wouldn't have seen the violence of the question. Or that you were already resigned to knowing there wasn't a way out. Not with him.

Shining, misshapen face turning from fin to fin. Waves follow waves, you watch them as you start to sink, and it occurs to you that this is about making your entire body disappear. To be made dead but also to be eaten. Will you die before being swallowed?

You put your head down on the sea, willing it, wishing it, to be a pillow.

To stand still in the sea is a marathon.

With each swell you're brought closer to the dark craggy rocks. They become an attitude, a rejection of you. They continue to put you in your place by luring you towards them. You don't dare touch them, and yet, the slower you move, the more you want to reach out your hand.

The circle gathers tightly, waxen bodies sloughing the waters. There is something playful or indignant in them, like children made to wait too long. Let's get on with it! They are clear of purpose but somehow delayed in carrying it out. No need now to catch your attention, they're plotting their angle on you. Discussing who gets what.

Your mouth pours out the last of its strangulated anxiety, somehow bringing you breath. You debate one death over the other: to be smashed against the rocks or to be eaten alive? Smashed against the rocks or eaten alive. Smashed. Eaten.

Your legs gallop in slow-motion, your arms following off-sync.

They are trying to exhaust you. To tire you out like those dogs that lope gently through the desert for days until their prey turns into a rag, and practically begs to be taken.

Keep treading. The ridiculousness of your legs doing the egg-beater in time with your chattering teeth.

Blood-mouthed, a slurry sent in the direction of the cliff: “How much longer?” You inhale saltwater. Cough. Gag. You feel the sweat of the sea beading up inside you. A ripple of shiny eyes waves through the blackness, a message from one to another, and, as if in answer, a head rears back and a black eye, round like a dove's, comes so close it fills your field of vision. You smell the reek. Its pure, invested violence. Bud rot in its teeth, a dull slab of flesh coming towards you but then falling away. Being pushed out by others.

And you realize that the circle, the steady, floating, waiting ring you've been part of for all these many minutes, is not made up of sharks, but of dolphins.

/ / /

Dolphin-saved.

In that mysterious way dolphins do: by surrounding a human to protect it against a lone shark. As simple as that, they slap at the water in grand unison with their tails and whisk you away.

From head to toe, buzzing, you are a hum, a human with the sea, not against it.

You groan at the impossibility of it. You cry out through your salt-racked throat. Your heart wells with love for daylight. You'll see it again! Your body and the sea are a combined freedom, swimming harmoniously, as you always have, as, dolphin after dolphin, you are nudged forward, out of the trap of the cove and into open water.

In a haze of time you will never be able to pin down, you reach the shore without ever having taken a good hard look at your saviours.

/ / /

When you open your good eye again it's to meet a blazing, round sun. You're lying in the ditch of a muddy road. Somehow, in your stupor, you made your way to the gate of one of the white mansions and buried yourself in the low-lying foliage that spreads over its tough, sandy lawn.

Without thinking, you get up and start to jog away. In which direction? Not to the roads, no, the bastard would have driven night and day to cool his rage and to banish you or your ghost. You know few people in this neighbourhood. The gates are high and barbed. It's not safe to knock on any doors. And what would you say? The bastard is king in these lands.

Anyhow, there is your body to attend to. Your crippling desire for water. It makes your movements erratic. So you limp and zigzag, careful to stay to the verge of the road.