The Fear Excerpt, Mark A. Zeiger

The Fear

An excerpt from the forthcoming short story collection, Shy Ghosts Dancing: Dark Tales from Southeast Alaska by Mark Zeiger

I wasn’t even thinking about them when I felt that first tugging bump against my ankle. For once, in this situation, they were the furthest things from my mind. Instead I thought about how good the water felt as I swam, the warmth of the Texas sun, and the attractive young woman who had spread her blanket close to mine on the beach. My mind was blissfully preoccupied when I got hit—not hard, just enough to jerk me downward slightly, making me gulp a mouthful of seawater.

I was confused. I had ventured too far out to hit bottom. No other explanation came to me, until I looked at my foot. I found a raw patch on the outside of my ankle, on the bony knob, a ruddy scrape like a rug burn.

As I stared at the abrasion, I saw movement beneath me. Realization dawned. The water, refreshingly cool before, suddenly seemed icy. I began to shake, my teeth rattling against each other as if about to fall out.

In that instant I felt The Fear.

The Fear developed in me as a child. I think it resulted from a dream I had in which my older brother and I swam off a low ledge. I sat dangling my feet in the clear water. My brother finished swimming and began to get out. As he boosted himself onto the ledge, I saw two yellow lights deep in the water below. They came toward us so fast they reached the surface just as my brother pulled himself from the water. It was a small shark, about three feet long. Its eyes glowed like light bulbs. It leaped into the air and bit my brother in the back, hitting him with the sound of a baseball bat whacking an inflated inner tube.

I woke up sick and horrified. The images of that dream have never left me. Neither has The Fear.

Sharks fascinated me long before the dream, and my interest only increased afterward. Sharks are cool. They’re nature’s perfect killing machines, a prehistoric beast virtually unchanged through the eons, with the merciful exception that they seem to have grown smaller. Even though they’re found in all oceans, and thousands are caught every day, with hundreds kept for study, they’re still largely unknown.

Any kid that spent as much time thinking about sharks as I did would probably feel uneasy stepping into a bathtub, but not me. I loved water. I went swimming whenever I could.

My family lived in Southeast Alaska then, in an island community surrounded by all the water a boy could want. Summers were short and cool, but always offered warmer days when we could grit our teeth and swim in the chilly ocean. Any day that looked promising, I’d usually be the first one in, unless my brother went in before me. Only occasionally would The Fear become unbearable. It would come suddenly, rushing from the back of my mind as I floated in gentle Inside Passage swells with my chin just below the surface. A still, small, perfectly reasonable voice whispered that sharks could be nearby. In fact, they could be cruising at that moment between me and the shore. Then came a moment of sickness, hearing—feeling the vibration of that inner tube thud as the dream shark pegged my brother.

It always passed. Common sense, courage, and my love of water pushed The Fear away. Sure, there were sharks, I reasoned. There were also bears in the woods. For that matter, humans surrounded me. I’d known of more people being killed by other people in my town than by sharks.

Sharks really were around. Great whites, the ones we call man-eaters, were supposedly rare in those cold northern waters, but not absent. I thrilled to hear some fishermen had caught a 13-foot great white in their nets. It made news, being fairly unusual, and timely, because the movie, Jaws had just been released.

Peter Benchley’s film had quite an effect on me. I despised myself for it, but The Fear’s small voice grew clearer and more insistent after I watched it. Still, I kept swimming.

Mr. Benchley’s book, The Girl from the Sea of Cortez, seemed written to correct the misconceptions and sensationalism Jaws created. In it he described sharks’ attraction to distress vibrations. The book’s heroine swam a great distance through the ocean. Sharks ignored her until she began to despair. Then her less-controlled motions attracted their attention. When she calmed down, and began swimming more deliberately again, the sharks lost interest.

Benchley is a noted shark expert, but I later developed an opinion that returned to me as I trod water in the Gulf of Mexico, with a raw and possibly bleeding ankle, and mysterious movement in the water around me. My opinion is, contrary to the claims of many ichthyologists, sharks are truly unpredictable. However much we may know about them, it is not nearly enough!

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Thank you for reading this excerpt! To read the rest of this story, and others like it by Mark A. Zeiger, order Shy Ghosts Dancing: Dark Tales from Southeast Alaska.

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