By Danielle Altman
I kneeled next to the elephant seal on San Simeon beach at dawn. It had been disemboweled and was missing half its face. Tendrils of pink intestines tumbled from its belly onto rocks and crows flapped cold sand around my bare feet as they descended. It was curled over in a tender way, as if the ocean had delivered it and its death with the greatest affection. Luke used to undress me and lay me on my side like that, cradling me from behind while he made me come, not bothering to take his wedding band off. The silver rubbing cool between my legs, against my breasts. A metallic, fishy scent.
The kill was so fresh the rot hadn’t set in.
I stumbled up crumbling dunes, toward the highway shoulder where I’d left my board with Kathy and Big Boy. The offshore wind, perfect for surfing, slashed my face. We’d just arrived, and they’d been checking the surf conditions while I investigated the seal.
“How recent was the attack?” Kathy asked, sweeping her dark braids over her shoulder as she zipped up her wetsuit, slightly taut over her belly. She was starting to show.
“Too recent,” I said, my nerves buzzing.
“Sharks don’t eat people.” Big Boy smoothed his beard. His gold wedding band, a recent addition, glinted warmly in the grey morning light.
I was suited up, but I hesitated to wax my board. On the pier, drunk fishermen laughed and tossed their lines into the water.
“Their chum draws the elephant seals.” Kathy tossed the tin of surfboard wax to Big Boy. “There’s a rookery past San Simeon. The babies are cute.”
“The seals draw the great whites.” Big Boy smoothed wax in slow circular motions down the flank of his board. His waxing and her suiting up made it clear we were going to surf this break. Two against one. We’d come together. If I was too afraid to surf with sharks, I’d have to sit it out alone on the beach or in the van, which would be embarrassing.
“Let’s head north a few miles, toward Big Sur.” I warmed my hands with my breath. “Find a beach without Jaws. Also, I forgot my leash.”
“You always forget your leash.” Kathy flung her arm around my shoulder. “And this was your idea. Remember?”
I didn’t. A hangover tapped my temples. The asphalt of the highway shoulder poked cold and sharp beneath my bare feet. Last night was a blur. Big Boy stuck the tin of wax in my hand. I nodded toward the shoreline, mumbling I’d follow soon, without being convinced I meant it.
They jogged away, until they were slim, dark brushstrokes, bounding in froth and haze. A consistent, left-hand break cut a line in the water, unfurling a dark green curl as smooth and curved as sea glass. The waves were perfect, six to seven feet. Big enough to be punishing.
Which is probably why I’d picked the spot. Out there, losing focus for an instant meant taunting death, and if I was focused on not dying, I couldn’t think of Luke. How his hand felt around my throat while he moved inside of me. The time my air con went out, we got naked, and made spaghetti. How he dried my body after showering, how he brushed my teeth when I was too drunk to do it, how he—. “Fuck you”, I mouthed to the ocean from the safety of the roadside.
I watched as Kathy caught a glassy wave that curled over with such mathematical precision it seemed cruel. I wished her pregnancy had made her less reckless or me more willing to talk her out of bad decisions. But it hadn’t. It had done the opposite. Our friendship had always been based on our commitment to recklessness and bad decisions, and her marriage and pregnancy felt like a threat to that bond. What if she kept growing up and I didn’t? What if she kept leaving me behind? Or maybe I was jealous I hadn’t figured out how to be someone’s wife. Luke’s wife. I tried to swallow but my mouth was too dry. Luke’s wife was due at the same time as Kathy.
Sometimes there’s no going back. I kneeled on the highway shoulder, waxed my board, and ran for shore. Freezing water grabbed my wrists and ankles. The ocean slapped me in the face as I ducked my board beneath the first in a series of wall-like waves I had to dart through to make it out. I became a boat with two paddles, rising and falling until my stomach dropped and my arms were fire. The barnacled trunks of the pier, larger-than-life railroad ties, flashed by. I tracked large and shadowy masses, and whenever I went under, I told myself they were rocks.
Out past the set, I straddled my board in a flat rolling sea. Fidgety, my heart thumping. A wave came. I paddled hard for it, but it pulsed beneath, faster and smarter than me. Leaving me spent and feeling stupid.
I calmed down enough to catch a wave. I felt a familiar weightlessness, the grace of speed, but I couldn’t enjoy it. I was too focused on how it might end. Would it shatter me on unseen rocks or deliver me into the mouth of a shark?
Hours later, exhausted and numb, I paddled to the end of the pier, close enough to hear the fishermen, their voices ruined as though years of whiskey and tobacco had corroded their throats. There was a boat launch ladder which offered the fantasy of an easy out, of ditching my board and climbing up. What else did I need from the ocean? I’d gotten what I wanted. I had forgotten Luke.
Slim, dark wings flapped in the distance, on the edge of my vision. It was Kathy, about thirty or so yards out, waving erratically at me and yelling something I couldn’t hear. My heartbeat liquified and flooded my ears. I twisted every which way searching for a shark fin. But there was just Kathy paddling for me, her thin shrieks threading the violent gusts of wind, and Big Boy straddling his board beyond the set, as still as a Zen master, unaware of us as he gazed out to sea. And the drunk laughter of the fishermen echoing from above the boat launch ladder. The fishermen. Kathy was pointing up at the fishermen.
I looked up at the chum tank. Like an idiot, I was beneath it. Sharks love chum. Before I could move, the tank overturned, and I was caught in a hailstorm of fish bits, guts, and slime. A circle of foam formed. Fish heads bobbed up, their lifeless eyes reflecting sunlight.
The fishermen hooted and yelled. “Hey girlie, don’t surf beneath the chum tank.”
“Fuck you!” I yelled up. Kathy was there then, half-laughing, half-concerned.
“Let’s book it,” Kathy said, already paddling toward shore.
Before I could get on my belly, it felt like a train crashed into my thigh beneath the surface. Working as a lever, it launched me, the side of my face stinging upon impact with the water. Divorced from my board, the current tugged me like a rag doll.
Bile rose in my throat. I spun, gagging on seawater, thrashing toward the ladder but I was on a treadmill. A great vibration enveloped me. Not like this. Memories flooded my brain: Luke, on my stoop, my forehead catching scruff as he dodged our last kiss.
Kathy yelled.
I reached out. Finally gripping rungs, I pulled up.
I was so numb that I couldn’t feel my body, so I checked it with my eyes: No blood. All limbs intact.
Something large splashed nearby.
Turning, I faced the beast.
It was hideous, a few thousand pounds. Grey, wrinkled, with a head as wide as the side of a semi-truck tire and a thick, penis-like nose that swung over a foot long across its gaping pink half-moon of a mouth. The elephant seal squawked and burped. Murderously cute.
“Your board!” Kathy yelled with concern, but just like me, her eyes were focused in awe on the seal. My sense of myself as a human dissolved as instantly as a sandcastle caught in a surprise wave. Gratitude fell over me. I’d gotten the reward of punishment. To be reminded that I was nothing.
My leash was being dragged out swiftly by the current. But that didn’t stop me from chasing it. Luke would reprimand me for not using a leash, like he always had. He’d said he didn’t want to see my face again, but he would want to hear this story. He loved chastising me for the risks I took even though he knew he was the greatest risk I’d ever taken. Elation powered me into deeper water. I knew the ending for me and Luke after all. There would be no ending. As long as I stayed alive, there was hope for us. I would go to him to get hurt, and he would hurt me again. We found too much ecstasy in my humiliation to stop.
Danielle Altman’s fiction, personal essays, and poetry have appeared in The Afterpast Review, Dream Boy Book Club, Literally Stories, and WREATH Literary. She’s at work on a novel set in the early 1980s Huntington Beach punk scene. You can find her on Instagram at @end_of_los_angeles.
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