The water is deep and black. Your light bounces off the surfaces of rocks. A landscape of shape and shadow. You listen to your breathing—oxygen dispersing through your regulator. You feel yourself suspended, cocooned, the water and your weights in equilibrium. There is that slight sway, the ocean rocking. You know that at the surface, the swell is fierce. That at the edge where the sand meets the sea, there are chunks of coral the size of baseballs that the water will hurl against your shins. You know that there, just past the waves, your life is waiting for you. The way your brother grieves. The way your father grieves. Your mother sick again. Her frail body failing.
But for now, you are beyond all of that. Submerged. You could almost be floating through space, the blackness. The rocks: asteroids. The lights from the others: their own individual galaxies. You move slowly, the water thicker in the dark. You follow a light into a cave, its arched ceiling, its cratered walls. Maybe trapped now. You cannot just rise to the surface and breathe the real air. Like your mother. Not enough oxygen pumping through the body. Short of breath, it’s called. But there’s nothing small about it. The way breathing occupies so much of her now. There in the cave you make your adjustments and sink down lower until you feel your fins scrape the ocean floor. There in the cave, a flashlight gestures. You follow the beam to a ledge.
You flatten yourself horizontal, head even with fins. It’s not that your mother is dying, it’s that she’s scared. She’s a woman who, historically, hasn’t been scared of much. Sharks, she says. She’s always been scared of sharks. And of course, this is why you’re here, 40 feet under, the dark liquid casing above you. And the cave. You are looking for them. For your mother.
And there below the ledge you find one. A lemon shark. Its body long, sleek. A pale apparition in your light, a creature from another world, another time. Ancient and yet completely new. For you. For your breath that catches. The shark’s narrow snout covering rows of jagged teeth. You should be afraid, like your mother, but you aren’t.
You feel a closeness. Both of you together under all that water. The way it rests docile beneath the ledge. You can’t tell if it’s looking at you or what its eyes are doing. Are you a threat? A disturbance?
Your mother is afraid of sharks because she once floated a cooler full of meat across an inlet of seawater and looked up to see a swarming of fins. Leopard sharks. Small but all muscle and teeth. Your mother is afraid of sharks because her father was. Because he was in Pearl Harbor. In the water. With the tiger sharks. He saw them rip into bodies. Or at least, this is what he said.
Your mother is afraid of sharks because they lurk beneath surfaces, unknown. But now it’s not the shark she fears: it’s pain.
And the loss of what she’s always known. In the cave, you struggle to make yourself breathe. You see your air bubbles rise up above you. You look to the shark again. Its gills opening and collapsing. You reach out to touch it, to feel what you know to be sandpaper skin. And it lets you. The rough surface of its body under your palm. You inhale, exhale. You feel it there before you, alive and unafraid.
Allison Field Bell is a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at the University of Utah, and she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New Mexico State University. Her debut poetry collection, All That Blue, is forthcoming in 2026. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Without Woman or Body (poetry, Finishing Line Press) and Edge of the Sea (creative nonfiction, CutBank Books). Allison’s prose appears or is forthcoming in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, The Gettysburg Review, The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.
Header photo by joakant, courtesy Pixabay.
