The Human Shark
12 Days of Fiction 2019, Day 3
Today is the day. The Passing Ceremony is upon us. It’s a day of celebration: we all swim to the Plain of the Passing, and there the Grand Master comes, and there is feast and rejoicing.
I recall my own ceremony. Oh, how scared I was. I was a youngling back then, of course, and my head was full of the stories we told each other. Rumours that were whispered in the reefs, murmurs from the deep. The Human Shark awaited us.
Ah, the stories. We have always had many stories. Our people loves them. But now I’ve seen it happening time and again, whenever the Passing approaches: the tales about the Humans always come back. I may or may not have contributed to that myself, now that I’m older.
But I was remembering when I was nearing my own Passing, and all we had were Humans here, Humans there. There were stories about them coming down to hunt us, in strange garments and weaving terrible weapons. Others were worse, for they spoke of brutal machines that grabbed us, and killed us, and destroyed our homes and the sea. Still others spoke of kind humans who dived down and talked to us in their incomprehensible language, and fed us and tried to befriend us. My favourites were those that talked of the lights above the waters, lights more powerful than the sun is when you break the surface, lights that the humans made using machines and somehow used against each other. Those tales explained what machines were, because from time to time humans dived using those machines, and sometimes they went back to the surface, and sometimes they plunged and never went up.
And they said the Human Shark was one of those. A horrifying machine built to turn those lights upon other humans, that the tale said had failed and come down to terrorize us.
Ah, the Passing. We had to face the frightening Human Shark, brave its dangers. We had to swim across it, knowing that it could wake up and consume us with its dire lights.
But nothing happened. Nothing ever happened since then. The Human Shark gets older and older, and some say even more dangerous. And we hold the Passing year after year, and our Younglings become Adults.
Still, the stories are always there. The Elders keep telling them, and Younglings listen and fret. Now that I’m long past a Youngling, now that I have nothing to fear from the Human Shark, my favourite tale is, I think, the weirdest one. It begins with a great disturbance, a quarrel of some kind amongst the Humans, with a display of frightful lights that lasts and lasts and lasts. All along, Humans in their machines, large and small, keep diving down, but they never swim back up. And then, one day, everything ends: the lights, and the machines. And since then, no more Humans have ever been seen, either below the surface by any of us, or above by those of us who dare take a peek.
That is indeed my favourite story.
This is my entry for Day 3 of my annual 12 Days of Fiction 2019. Playing with points of view.
