The ocean smelled of salt and death

It’s as if she knew all along; knew that the ocean would be her demise, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. She learned to walk on Florida beaches, learned to swim in Hawaiian lagoons and even had her first kiss while sitting on a surfboard off the coast of Australia; the ocean didn’t frighten her at all.

She was fortunate enough to have been born into a wealthy family so it was easy for her to travel so as to commune with the world’s seas and oceans. In her travels she’d experienced her fair share of ocean related incidents: coral cuts, jellyfish stings and run ins with barracuda, but nothing could keep her out of the water.

Sharks, however; sharks spoke to her spirit and she tried to spend as much time with them as she could. For her there was nothing more magical than sharing one small sliver of time swimming with these powerful creatures. Petting the rough skin of a blue shark as it moved past her, feeding a bull shark by hand and even going for a ride on the dorsal fin of a whale shark; such moments had been hers, and she wouldn’t trade them for a single drop of the blood that was now seeping out of her.

The open ocean was like a liquid desert, vast and largely lifeless, and she had sailed into the heart of it on her way to Cape Town South Africa. She had seen the jumping sharks there before, and cried at the beauty of it, amazed and speechless that something so large could be so stunning.

She had stopped for a swim, diving into the blue depths over and over and even played with a pod of dolphins that had happened by. Close to sunset it had been the arrival of the Great White that had surprised her; in such an endless realm it was amazing that their paths had crossed.

She had done everything she was supposed to do: she began moving back toward her boat, not panicking, not splashing, just swimming steadily. When he made his first pass she could feel his coarse skin against her leg, and she was torn between wanting to wait for the chance to feel it again and continuing toward the boat. She wasn’t stupid, she kept moving toward the silhouette of her boat.

She knew that sharks investigated things by putting them in their mouths, much like infants, but infants weren’t armed with rows and rows of razor sharp teeth. It was just bad luck that his first exploratory bite severed her femoral artery.

She floated on her back, arms stretched wide as she stared up at the blanket of stars passing slowly overhead. At that moment the ocean smelled of salt and death, her death, and she waited for the sleek predator to return to claim her; now she would never have to be away from the ocean she loved.