The Sigma Asset 🏳️‍🌈 (bxb)║AMBYS WINNER 2022

36: Sharks and Lobsters

The day before Will's surgery I packed my afternoon with endless tasks, determined not let my thought-strings buzz with worries about the trip to the hospital.

The back porch was almost unbearable in the baking heat, but I kept working on the passport application form that Clive had picked up for me from City Hall, and that Ana Maria from the Korean Embassy had promised to keep on file in the increasingly unlikely event that Eomma claimed me.

Zephyrs blew despite the heat, making my passport forms flutter as I wrote, occasionally blowing them off the porch as if trying to cast them into the ocean to stop me from getting home.

Tired of jazz, I cycled through the preset channels on Will's little blue kitchen radio, through Jazz Radio, CaliJazz, Jazz Oregon, stopping at Arenosa County Radio. The weather forecast on the radio announced high winds in the Arenosa Bay area. And a warning of sightings of two six-meter great white sharks in Santa Elena Bay.

I looked out toward the horizon; everything looked pretty chill. Kids were paddling in the shallows, kayaks were bobbing on the sand bar, and the last surfer of the season was out in the deeper waters where long rollers were cresting. I guessed that Californians were totally zen about sharing the water with sharks.

I had an hour before Sabrina arrived for her four-thirty piano lesson, but the thought of shark attacks and Will's surgery halted my passport application-writing in its tracks. I took the radio back to the kitchen windowsill, passing the front porch on my way back through the sunroom. Will's car was parked in the drive. Was he back from work so early? I went to the porch window to wave, but the car was empty. I hadn't seen Will in the house.

"Will?" He wasn't in his bedroom, or in the bathroom. I called up the stairs to the blue room. Nothing. Will wasn't on the back porch, nor on the stretch of beach beyond the house. Had he gone to Gloria's?

At the northern edge of the beach gulls were turning in the strong wind, and every few moments the tiny dot of a surfer glided around on the huge breakers where the curve of the bay met the cliffside, before disappearing again behind the bulk of the cliff face. The waves were enormous. It was probably the last good surfing day of the year.

Shibal.

I raced back to the porch, and my heart dropped. Will's surfboard was gone. He wouldn't have heard the shark warnings.

There wasn't time to spare. I sprinted across the sand toward the cliffside, hoping that Will could see me signaling to him from the water's edge. The beach had been closed a couple of times in the past weeks because of shark sightings, but the coast guard hut was empty, with no sign that the beach was about to be evacuated.

Wading into the shallows by the rockpools that swirled beneath the cliff faces on the northern stretch of beach, I waved madly at the lone surfer out in deeper water. Was it even him?

The surfer didn't notice me, and plunged back into the waves. Gulls weaved over the cliffside, calling each other with high-pitched screeches. Alarm calls.

Panic set into my bones as I waded waist-deep into the freezing water, waving frantically. Will's lungs were too weak from the fibroma; paddling to the breakers would have made him too tired to withstand a wipeout.

But the surfer paddled on, deeper and deeper. I screamed at him, arms waving manically, when a colossal white-edged breaker crashed, taking him under.

A minute later and he still hadn't surfaced. My heart beat demisemiquavers in my ears as I watched the rollers crash on and on.

Please let him be OK.

The surfer's red surfboard bobbed up from under a wave, and he clambered onto it. Will's surfboard was green. It wasn't him. The relief lasted a second before being washed away by a wave of new terror. Where the fuck was Will?