Kyle's Fish

The thick body of the fish glided along the sandy bottom of the shallow sea, its mouth held open in a foreboding grin. The water was murky, but the creature rarely relied on sight; its nose picked up every organic molecule within the length of a football field, and a lateral line of sensory organs felt the minute electrical impulses of every living thing in the vicinity. The great fish saw only a cloudy green emptiness and the dull tawny sand of the sea floor, but understood perfectly on some primitive, instinctual level its role as the ecosystem’s apex predator.

“Come spray sunscreen on my back, Kyle,” the woman said to her son.

He obliged, depressing the nozzle and coating his mother’s back with a protective layer of SPF 30 as they stood together on the balcony of their twentieth floor beachfront condominium.

The surf, far below, was calm and inviting, as it so often was on Florida’s Gulf Coast. The family had traveled all the way from Tennessee for a much needed vacation from their busy lives; Kyle had just finished his freshman year, and his parents both worked hard. They all felt the dire need to get away for a while and unwind.

“You ready, hun?”

“Yep,” Kyle said, grabbing his towel and swim mask and heading towards the door.

The predator swam along the sandbar, focused entirely on locating its next piece of prey. The electroreceptors on its snout tingled as it picked up the vibrations of a stingray buried in the sand. The fish turned instantly toward the source of the signals, its torpedo-shaped body glistening in the refracted sunbeams, and the stingray was torn apart as it struck haphazardly with its barb in a desperate attempt to save itself.

The bull shark swallowed most of the ray in a single bite, and had forgotten the encounter entirely in a matter of seconds as it swam closer to shore, following the instructions given by its powerful sensory organs as they scanned the water for something else to eat.

Kyle watched the lifeforms dawdle about on the sandy bottom as he breathed in and out through his snorkel. A small crab danced back and forth, occasionally disappearing into the sand when a wave passed overhead. Schools of baitfish skittishly skirted around him on all sides, reacting to his every movement by darting quickly out of reach. Further out, he could see the silhouettes of sheepshead and the rare flash of a barracuda as it dashed after some unseen morsel. The occasional jellyfish drifted by with the tide, and he took care to avoid the long spindles of stinging tentacles.

He had always loved the ocean, and took advantage of every opportunity he had to study the habits of the countless forms of marine life in their own world. From a young age, he’d wanted to be a marine biologist, dreaming of spending his life aboard a ship and studying the animals he found so fascinating in order to further the collective knowledge of humanity.

His eyes were tracking the movements of a hermit crab as it searched for a more comfortable shell when the shark’s ampullae picked up the enticing signals given off by his legs as he kicked through the water. Unbeknownst to Kyle, the deadly ten foot mass of shark flesh, cartilage, and serrated triangular teeth was now headed straight for him as it followed the slope of the sandy bottom up towards the shore.

The fish was locked onto a powerful signal coming from the shallows along the beach. The erratic nature of the pulses triggered rudimentary memories in the creature’s brain of wounded fish and crippled sea birds, easy meals that had no way of escaping or fighting back.

Before long, the source was in view. The shark hesitated as it saw a strange figure floating on the surface, flapping its appendages and occasionally diving down to the bottom to sift through the sand and blow bubbles that floated lazily upwards.

It decided to swim in for a closer look, its primitive brain unsure what to make of this alien invader. It made a wide arc around the strange creature from behind, watching as it kicked and pulled the water with its long, skinny limbs. After a single pass, the big bull decided that whatever the thing was, it was not food. The fish disappeared into the blue-green haze while Kyle continued to watch the hermit crab, fascinated by the way it popped inside its shell at even the slightest disturbance.

“Don’t forget your sunglasses, son,” Mark said to Kyle. “You’ll have to squint so hard your head will start hurtin’ and you won’t have a lick of fun.”

Kyle grabbed his shades and stuck them into the side pocket of his backpack. He couldn’t wait to get aboard the boat. His father was an avid fisherman back home, and spent most of his free time catching bass in the waterways of Tennessee. Kyle sometimes accompanied him, but he knew that their current undertaking would be a different experience entirely. The bass and occasional snapping turtle one could catch in the rivers and creeks back home were interesting enough, but he knew that they couldn’t hold a candle to whatever he might reel in twenty miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.

Mark kissed his wife goodbye, then crossed the road with his son to the dock where the fishing boat sat waiting.

The apex predator cruised along the edge of a shipwreck hundreds of feet below the surface. The wreck had been sitting on the bottom for decades, and functioned as an artificial reef, attracting dozens of species from miles around. The rusty hull was teeming with life of all sizes; aquatic plants and various mollusks took up residence in the crevices, forming the base of the lengthy marine food chain that went all the way up to the big predators.

During the day, the light of the sun just barely reached the bottom, dousing the entire scene in an eternal murky twilight. It was an underwater city, and the big bull had been here many times before when it grew tired of hunting in the shallows. It circled the sunken ship lazily, darting sometimes to grab a fish or squid that made the mistake of swimming too close. This was its routine, from the moment it was born: swimming, and eating, and mating every once in a while. Its entire life had been one long, uninterrupted stream of consciousness, never sleeping, always moving forward, and absolutely never looking back.

Kyle felt something tug at the end of his line. Or did he?

The sun had long since gone down, and he was starting to get tired. His father had caught a couple of snapper and a nice king mackerel, but until now, Kyle hadn’t gotten a single bite.

There it was again, Kyle thought. He wanted to wait until he was sure; earlier he’d cried wolf and reeled in all three hundred feet of line to find his bait still intact on the hook. He didn’t want to risk another such moment of abject humiliation in front of his father and the other fishermen, so he held his horses, clutching his pole and waiting for something substantial to happen.

All of the sudden, his reel screamed as yards of line were stripped off by the second, and every head on the boat turned his way as the two deckhands tripped over each other trying to reach him.

“Big fish, bud,” one of them said as he playfully pinched Kyle’s tiny adolescent bicep. “Hope you’re ready for this.”

The deckhand took the rod and set the hook, then handed the pole to Kyle as he went to fetch him a fighting belt. As soon as he took control of the rig, his aquatic opponent on the other end of the line pulled him violently against the transom. Kyle’s father grabbed his belt from behind, a terrifying image of his son falling overboard into the black water flashing across his mind’s eye.

With every ounce of strength he had, Kyle began to reel.

The great fish knew only that something was not right.

It had taken a particularly bloody chunk of meat, and realized soon after that something had hold of it. There was a dull throbbing in the crook of its jaw, but it hardly noticed as its brain was flooded by chemicals that carried only one message: Survive!

Kyle was at the end of his rope. He’d been fighting the beast for over an hour, and his muscles were entirely drained. Still, something within him would not allow him to give up. Perhaps it was the pride in his father’s eye as he watched his son take on what must have been the biggest fish in the ocean.

Just as he started to consider handing the pole off to his dad, one of the deckhands sounded off: “Bull shark!” he yelled, as everyone on board looked into the black depths and saw the abstract shape of a colossal fish thrashing around in the beams of the floodlights mounted over the ship’s deck.

The sight of his catch gave Kyle access to a reserve of strength he never knew he had. He cranked on the reel, pulling the shark closer and closer to the surface of the Gulf as the deckhand stood by, armed with a gaff and grinning like a madman. Before long, the monster shark reached the surface, shaking its head and sweeping its tail. It was tired, but far from defeated.

The other deckhand stepped out of the cabin, twelve gauge shotgun in hand. He lowered the barrel over the side of the boat and blasted the fish in the head. It didn’t seem to slow the beast down at all. Twice more, he racked the slide and delivered an ounce of lead into the shark’s skull, but the fish kept fighting, determined to break free and return to the safety of the depths.

The other deckhand reached down into the water with the gaff and caught the shark in its second gill slit, pulling hard and raising it up far enough for a rope to be tossed around its tail. The two men grabbed the rope and hauled the great fish onto the deck.

The apex predator writhed and snapped its jaws, unable to breathe in this strange environment. It had no idea what was going on, no concept of its own mortality, but even so, it felt the incessant drive that had always propelled it ebbing away into the ether. Still it fought, however, thrashing about wildly and trying to find something, anything, to sink its jaws into.

It felt the strange sensation of bearing its own weight, something it had never felt before. Sitting still was also a new experience, and the shark did not like it. It did not like any of these things that were happening. Slowly, it started to desist as its mind began to darken. It felt a great pain in its head, and for the first time in its life, it didn’t have the strength to fight back any longer. It relaxed, and allowed itself to die.

The men on the boat were laughing and giving each other high fives as one of the deckhands sat Kyle down on the great fish’s head, instructing him to hold the bloody jaws open for a picture.

Though his father beamed at him, and the captain stepped out of the cabin to pat him on the back and say “Congratulations, boy, that’s one hell of a fish”. . . though he smiled for the picture, and some barbaric part of him was proud of what he’d done . . . a voice in the back of his mind gnawed at him, and he could not shake the guilty thought:

This is wrong.