Last Moments: Shark Victim

Then I couldn’t feel it’s teeth anymore. I could still see —oh, I could see everything. But at that late stage, why would I look? What must have only been seconds, or even a single, solitary second, seemed to go on forever. Not the forever that a convict feels awaiting sentencing or dog pining for its master's return. Forever in that I was not constricted by time, in that I felt no compulsion to rush. Perhaps a first in my life. So I looked away. I watched the sun setting over the ocean. I had seen a thousand sunsets and none had made near such an impression. The sun was perfect circle of orange gold. And though I could feel nothing, I looked at it and knew warmth. It lit the waters with rose and violet and deep purples that I had forever attributed to sunlight passing through pollution. God, talk about cynical. And the water! It stood so calm for what I would have expected. One assumes there would be a great swirling of the waters and a massive, terrible wake foreboding your doom. But no, aside from my own terrified splashing, there had been nothing else to disturb the scene. And now, with that at an end, a peaceful equilibrium had been restored. I would meet my end without fanfare, but it gave me a new perspective. The ocean no longer reacted to my presence. It no longer resisted me. I was welcomed in a way that no man alive has ever been. I looked back at the entirety of my life —I had the time, you understand, and I did so with a new clarity. I remembered moments I had long since thought forgotten and regrets that memory would never allow me to forget. I'd always longed to be part of something greater than myself and now I was. I looked back upon my life and at no point had I ever felt so accepted, so at peace, or so fulfilled.

I looked back. The water was black with my blood. Black? Some trick of the eyes perhaps. And as the shark disappeared with no small portion of me, I reached out my hand to touch it. To thank it somehow for this final gift. It’s skin was not what I had expected, but what is at this point? It felt coarse, like a sandpaper made out of tiny triangular teeth. For a moment, as if measurement of time can be relevant, I feared that I had failed. But as the water around me continued to blacken and my body’s component parts seem to drift away from each other, I realized I had already given the sum total of my thanks. It had relieved me of all the worst in me, leaving me only with true joy. With that, I died.