Bunny and Shark Read Free Page A

you, makes you lithe and sleek and fast. Queen of the breaststroke, you drop deeper underwater and you feel your old power come back. Warm and confident, you continue making wide arcs in front of you, leaving a solid wake behind you. You have a destination. A plan.
    To forget the land. And the palms and the Precinct and the friends’ villas you’d had visions of sneaking into. It is the sailboats that are sanctuaries. Their locks are feeble and, anyhow, you know where the spare keys are. You can picture them hanging from a tiny plastic buoy hidden behind the wooden shutters of the cabin doors or lying at the base of a heavy coil of rope.
    The sea goes suddenly cold. Salt shores up and flocks densely around you, blindly magnetized to your skin. Because you are not the sea. You are blaring and human and soluble. You swallow a mouthful of the saltwater to feel the purity of its threat: how it is capable of dissolving your organs, then your bones, then lastly, your skin. From the inside out you will be nullified. You will become a suspension.
    Liquid dust, you are nothing without him. You say his name out loud. Instead of saying “the bastard” you say his real name. Then you say it again, wanting to exorcise yourself of him, but the effect is opposite. His name overwhelms and belittles you. You cry out an embarrassed, stilted sound, barely any voice left. There is a shuttling wall of fire welling up in you, running slow and liquid, starting at your heart and spreading outwards. You push against it. The onslaught is almost peaceful. The enormity of murder being so straightforward.
    Fucking bastard: the shark pit was a joke. Your joke even; you told the bastard and the others about it, that ten to twelve sharks slummed regularly at the foot of the Lowlands cliff. But it was a myth. So how was it that the bastard made a real shark appear?
    You sob, right there in the middle of the sea. Your arms get drained of all their power, they hang disembodied at your sides. You have to stop, turn onto your back. Float. Your miracle and your plans evaporate: he betrayed you. He cut you out.
    Tread water, keep afloat, breathe hard. Breathe so the red-and-white boat looming out in front of you comes to within an arm’s reach.
    The ladder is down. You bring yourself close to it and put your foot on the slippery step, feeling the hard tug of the ocean as you pull yourself up. You take your clothes off immediately, balling them up and pitching them overboard. Naked and dripping you watch them sink. But do they? You don’t stick around to find out. Check later, you think. Your footprints will be dry soon. You’ll leave no traces. Trust he won’t remember what was there and what wasn’t. You’ll eat sparingly.
    You take the key from the hiding place and open the lock without having to force it. As you crouch down the narrow stairs into the low cabin compartment, the smell of your own perfume hits you hard, as does your sudden sense of house-possession. The familiarity and comfort of it all and how it’s all still your world. The bastard’s bed, everything as you pictured it to be: bottles and glasses spread out over the cabin, your watch, exactly where you remembered it to be, the food you’d thought of still there on the shelves. You take the food, fall into your bed, and eat it, doing everything all at the same time, making crumbs, putting on your watch, wanting to do everything, to have everything, to be everything this represents.
    Jumping up again. Stopping yourself from cleaning up, but doing it mentally. Then stopping that impulse. You must memorize the arrangement of everything and not touch too much. Can fingerprints be dated? Will he expect to find that rotting tray of hors d’oeuvres next time he comes, or can you throw it away? It smells. Stop it. Let it reek.
    â€œRot on him,” you say, food falling out of your mouth.
    Curl your body up into your sheets away from the filth and