Bunny and Shark Read Free Page B

into the darkness. You breathe in the smell of yourself. So pungent and new. Still you. Just deeper somehow.
    / / /
    By morning, it rains. Without thinking of anything, certainly not danger, you stretch out your arms behind your head and glance down to your thighs. A thing you do every morning with mild disgust and no definite plans to do anything about it. Then the usual thoughts of coffee and breakfast and cigarettes. Jesus, you say, through a cough and a laugh, your hands scramble around the cubbies by your bed. Where are your cigarettes? While your hands search, a hint of fear passes into your heart. Your hands continue searching while you look out your porthole window, scanning for something coming your way. Nothing: only more and more ocean water in one direction, and across the way, through the other porthole: the shore, houses, people as specks starting to fill up the beach. You pull your sheets up around you as you spot a pack of cigarillos under the bastard’s bed. You make the effort to reach for them and light up with the bastard’s gold lighter.
    â€œThe pit was a myth and somehow a real shark appeared to eat me all up. You piece of shit,” you say, smoking. “You retarded piece of shit, feeding me to a myth,” you say, getting louder, until you find you are raving and ashing all over the cabin, not caring about the glasses you smash on purpose, overturning the objects not nailed down to the floor. You run over to the bastard’s bed, and rip the sheets off and rub the stub of cigar and all the ash and peels into his pillow.
    â€œYou piece of betraying fuck!” And you march naked and sweaty over to the fridge and take out all the food: bright pink pâté, a sausage peeled back from its white covering, murky pickles, and make a pile on the bastard’s bed where you eat it like you’re actually a sow, or some kind of animal ripping the food apart with your chipped nails, letting it all smear across your face and drip onto your exposed rolls. You make stains on the sheets. You indulge in rubbing it in.
    Eat until you think you must be full. Though you don’t feel it, your raw, empty heart racing is the only sensation. Brushing yourself off, you go up on deck, smoking another cigarette to have a proper look at who or what might be looking for you.

Day two dead
    (In which rain rises up from the ocean and
    washes the rage away.)
    C OCKSURE, RADIATING FILTH . Tobacco on your nostril out-breaths. After a flash rainfall, as you lie on the deck with eyes closed, heat bears down on you through a crack in the clouds. You stay that way, leaned up against the front cabin window where you’d always sit with your 11 a.m. cocktail, and you revel in the post-tantrum energy. Of it being over now. The familiar aftermath qualities of thrill: of having won the argument and wrecked the house. Smashing expensive things just makes the point that everything is worthless to you anyway. Replaceable. Exchangeable. Except you won’t let yourself be: you’ll remake, reframe, get back to your beautiful self. Polish, style, adorn. Pull out your reliable charms.
    In time, you smell smeared pâté cooking on your skin. It dawns on you, and you smile: the sun is sending you a message. You bake, you swell. You imagine this sun pouring life into you. How it is meant just for you. How it is telling you: you don’t need to be dead. That you were subject to a miracle. Of always having received.
    You picture the heel of your stiletto pushing the accelerator of your SAAB as you speed past the black boys on bikes to get to the Plaza Cavalia, the plaza at the centre of town, so much shinier than the real one in Italy. Then you picture the wad of clothes you arrived in slowly sinking to the bottom of the ocean. They hit the plankton soundlessly. You run your hands over your sweating naked body. It’s on the fat side, sure, but your Bunny is still there pushing through the surface.