Bunny and Shark Read Free

they’ve been notified. Bunny’s good as dead, pal.”
    Coke-Bottle’s car drives away as you make your way down the beach road. The lobster-seller doesn’t miss a beat of his hum-song, but raises an eyebrow. The hot skin of your feet on asphalt is electric, transporting you, inch by inch, back towards the water, where you were delivered. A miracle, the dolphins, no question. Sustain this, please. You can’t handle the real of this yet. The let-down of walking on the ground, the dead-heavy slowness of it. The dolphins made a cradle for you, just go back there to them, to where you’re protected. You deserve to be protected, you were born to that.
    The smell of takeout goes by, something fried, devoured, discarded, a crumple in your ear. Girls in gold earrings as large as baskets hang around, their laughter mixing with the smell of the food you couldn’t buy if you wanted to. Reaching the end of the road, you glance towards a garbage bag that looks just put out. Beside it, a pair of shoes. They are the hearty, lace-up leather kind worn by older live-in maids. The shoes fit you perfectly.
    Light-headed when you lift yourself up from the street after putting them on, you think: now I can at least walk somewhere. But you’re not sure where to go without any money. You don’t even have a purse to carry so that it looks like you have money.
    You reach the end of another small road, one leading to the beach by the bay. All locals here. You’ll only be able to stay by night in these parts. Tonight you’ll sleep tucked up next to the abandoned house. First you walk your new shoes right over the steep ledge of sand and sit down there to listen. Not so far out from the shore you see a number of anchored sailboats: Coke-Bottle’s sleek black vessel, the Italian’s blue, the bastard’s newly painted red and white. Your eye is now all closed up and quiet and you stare for a long time at those haunted emblems of the men who will continue to sit at your dinner table. Until your one good eye becomes exhausted, loses focus, and with it the facts of the boats and the reality of the distances that surround you. You see your own boat shape-shift against the strain on your good eye, it becomes a blob, then a sea creature, so you close your eyes to think of what’s inside. Make the tour of the sailboat.
    Last time you were there it was dawn. You left in the dinghy, left the bastard sprawled out in his bed, the sheets and his drunk flesh pouring into the small cabin. All drunk and dressed up. But now it is empty. In blackness you roam the cabin. You can feel yourself right there, opening the cupboards and cracking a bottle of fizzy water. Your narrow bed with the silk sheets and your clothes stuffed in the drawers. Your magazines and your watch in the cubby by the bed. It would be so easy to swim out there and sleep in your bed and put on your watch. Can you steal the time back again for good?
    Fuck these shoes, fuck invisible. Fuck these shoes. You kick them off and head straight for the shoes you now see before you, your own expensive sandals in the closet of the cabin next to the fire extinguisher. You’re still an excellent swimmer even if you are getting old. You find you are running, the water isn’t even cold or threatening, it is a pathway back; it will only take you half an hour to get there if you swim fast.
    / / /
    As you swim, the pulse of the dolphin’s strange skin stays with you, like body recall that lasts long after the lover is gone. You feel sure that the dolphin embedded its soundless whine in you and that now you too are a reader of the dark channels. Your body has vibrational power, it sends ciphers out behind each kick as if to say, Here I come. No fear of sharks or jellies – you’ll sense them if they’re near – nor of the airless darkness. Yes, in the water you are lightness itself, your fat flies off you, drifts away behind