Читать книгу Creatures of Passage - Morowa Yejidé - Страница 16

PARABLE OF THE DREAMER

The great white moved through the water like a submarine on watch for the enemy, his icy glare matched only by his cold will. His bleached underbelly was as massive as that of a whale, and his serrated teeth jetted from mammoth jowls that sucked in water like some wild sinkhole. The beast powered through the currents he’d marked as his territory, magnetic north guiding his dorsal fin from one point of the horizon to another. He swam on, an unrelenting patroller, until he spotted a man in a boat and rocketed toward him.

The great white circled the craft and said to the man, “You’re in my waters.”

The man sat calmly in his boat. His dark and bare legs spanned almost to the bow, and he braced them as he adjusted the line of his sail, anchoring it around the half finger of his hand like a hook. He looked at the shark. “Waters can’t be yours.”

The shark surveyed the miles of briny deep he had already cleared and turned a glacial eye to the man. “These waters are mine and I’m going to kill you.”

“Why?”

“Because I can. Because I am.”

“I am too.”

“You exist only because I am looking at you.”

“You really believe that?”

“I do.”

The man peered over the water at the peopled land and back at the shark. “You can’t kill us all.”

“Makes more to hunt.”

“But more to come.”

“True,” said the shark. And he opened wide his great orifice and bit into the side of the boat with the force of a bomb, dragging the man under.