PoraBora

Chapter Six

"Sharks and seagulls!" shouted Pe, dragging the tiller as hard port as she could, cutting the motor to nothing as the boy disappeared. She unhooked, dashed to the side to look over the edge, and then dashed back to make sure the tiller held. "Sharks and seagulls and sackfish!"

The kid had jumped in. She'd just finished saving his life, they'd seen a shark, and he'd jumped in. He was going to die. He was going to die and she could barely see him and that shark was going to eat him.

And it was a big shark.

She could tell.

She couldn't see it, now, or the boy, and she could see that in her head, the shark darting like a firelock shot right through the kid, blood spraying into the water, a chunk torn from his side, and her mother, hand in hers, saying it was going to be all right, and she shouldn't worry, and to try to make it back to land where someone could help her, and then she was dead, and the kid was dead, and Pe was flailing in her own blood, leg missing.

She was squeezing the peg leg until her knuckles were white. It itched terribly. Not where it met her thigh, but the wood itself; it itched from cup hold to notched toe, the whole way up and down.

"Sackfish!" she shouted again. The boy didn't come up. The itching got worse. It began to ache. She squeezed it harder, leaning her chin into it, all but hanging from the tiller.

The kid was being eaten.

It's not on your boat.

Except it would be, because once the shark got through him, she would pull him up, like she had pulled up her mother, and he would bleed all over her boat, all over her, and they'd both be lying in it until she woke up with a red, wet cloth tied around where her appendage was supposed to be.

And he would not.

She leaned over the rail and then paced the deck twice across. She leaned over again. His ripples were lost in the swells. She couldn't find his shape, and when she went to the other side, she couldn't see the shark.

You would see blood, she told herself. You would see blood everywhere. Then why hadn't he come up?

And then he did.

She heard him just off the bow and dashed to see. It's not a decapitated head, she said to herself, because it was her first thought when she saw it, dark in the water. It was him, with his body, and there was no blood, so probably with his limbs as well.

"Pora!" Pe exclaimed, and she grabbed the boy's hand and pulled him up.

He breathed like he hadn't just been swimming with a ten-foot-long predator whose teeth came in rows and series.

"What on the swimming seas were you thinking!" She had mostly meant it as a question, but it came out too shrilly for that.

"Bora--"

"Oh, Pora Bora!" she snapped. "Don't—don't even answer if you're not going to make sense! That was a shark! You don't just—just jump in like that!"

He watched her a little slack-jawed.

"Did you think it was a dolphin? That it wanted to play and...and...it was going to kill you! Do you understand? It was going to tear you into—into little white chunks of flesh, and it was going to eat you."

He watched her a lot slack-jawed.

"Eat you," Pe repeated. "You would have been food! Eaten! Tota!"

"Tota," said the boy, and he looked over to the bird.