Motherfucking Sharks

by Brian Allen Carr

  Kinky Pete draws his gun. He says, “Nope, best to come with me,” and he leads Scraw to the cell where Crick is held captive and deposits him there.

  On Pete’s way home with Mom, it begins to rain.

  Rain, Rain, Rain

  This is the part where it rains. It will rain so good, you will go get lines from it tattooed on your body and every time it is raining outside you will find strangers in the rain, going to them while holding an umbrella, and you will look them in the eyes and say, “How about this weather?” and they will say, “I know,” and then you will show them the tattooed line from this book that made you think anew about rain, and their eyes will smile at you, just the two of you beneath your umbrella, locked in the magic of the words on the subject of rain as inked on your body by a tattoo artist who probably likes girl on girl porn.

  Mom is home with her face against the window. Kinky Pete is home on his porch playing with his pistol. Crick and Scraw are in the cell. Murm stands inside the slaughterhouse in front of the door swishing his tail watching the puddles grow.

  Armies of drops fall, swelling the streets with impromptu rivers. The roofs cast sheets of rain from their lips like waterfalls. The thunder booms. The lightning strobes. The music of the falling rain hisses.

  Rain According To Pete

  I don’t know how it gets in the sky. I’m serious. The rain. They probably taught me at some point, but I didn’t pay attention, because my back always aches so much I don’t pay attention to school-type things, but I do know enough to know it starts off as water and gets turned to clouds, and that the clouds get too heavy, you can tell by the look of them, and then it just falls. It’s a storm. But it can rain with the sun out. Used to we’d say, when it rained and was sunny, that the devil was beating his wife, but I have no idea where that saying came from. Sayings are always stupid things. I had a Mexican aunt couldn’t speak English, and she used to say to me, whenever I hurt myself, “Sana sana colita de rana,” which meant, “heal heal little frog tail,” and her saying it was supposed to take away the pain, but I’m not certain how, and my uncle used to say, “A monkey in a dress is still a monkey,” but he never saw a monkey in his whole life, so I don’t know where he came up with that.

  Rain, Rain, Rain

  Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain!

  Rain According to Scraw

  Maybe it’s like God crying because I killed Bark. Not every time, but this time. I think God exists. I might be going to Hell. The guy in the cell with me definitely is. I’m thirsty. I’m gonna hold my hand out the window and catch some of God’s tears and drink them. If the water I catch is salty, well the rain is God’s tears for certain.

  Rain in Various Languages

  German: Regnen

  Spanish: Lluvia

  French: Pluie

  Italian: Pioggia

  Pig Latin: Ainray

  Rain According to Crick

  Fuck the rain, and fuck this weird guy with his hand out the window.

  Rain According to You

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  Rain According to Mom

  Because he liked ice cream. That’s why he drank liquor from a sundae bowl. I bet it even made sense to him once upon a time. Or, maybe the first time he said it. The first time he said it, it probably got him a laugh, and after that he just said it all the time, but I never laughed at it. I’d just look at him like, “Why?” What he needed was water. It’s what we all need. Not this much. The juggler, he was right about the rain, but I just can’t believe he’s right about the sharks. He doesn’t seem crazy when you talk to him, but he doesn’t seem honest either. Maybe he tells people about the motherfucking sharks coming out after the rain for the same reason my father said he drank because he liked ice cream. Maybe. Somehow. Somewhere. It worked for him. The story about his family too. Maybe in some towns, the people go in for the theatrics of it. They like the drama of his past’s misery, and they celebrate his act and treat him as a renowned performer.

  The Rain Stops

  Here is how it starts: with a whisper, a hiss. A shallow spray the scent of fresh. It comes first as pure calm. The tree limbs that fooled in the breeze go serious, fall still, and the world seems paused in anticipation. But in that hallowed still there seems a promise. The nutrition of nature is imminent. The ashy second skin of the world sat dry will be washed gone, and dragged on makeshift currents to conclusions only God can perceive.

  In the town, the hush of the coming storm dwindles, eaten by the noise of that which is certain, and with silence’s tapering, residents seek refuge in dwellings ill-equipped for flood—the security provided by them more mental than actual—and they hold their breaths and seek their misplaced religion, hiding behind verses their forefathers died clucking in battle so that their descendants might lead softer lives—the byproduct of their easy living ironically the cause of their failing beliefs.

  But here in this fear of God’s hammer, a re-awakening of those cultural touchstones. Soul-shaped hands seek heaven-shaped promises to hold and hold onto, even as the storm douses the streets until they bulge like blisters—the girth of them puny against the eternity of the flood.

  Take a coin from your pocket and pour a gallon on it.

  Take a coin from your pocket and drop it into a gallon.

  Take a coin.

  Here the homes wiggle and sway with wind. Here the
roofs leak streams from low holes into buckets that miserably perform.

  Children hold their mothers. Wives hold their husbands. Husbands hold their breaths.

  This storm is a carbon copy.

  A carbon copy of prior storms.

  Magically, no one dies in the dread of it. The weather seems aware of the townsfolk’s limitations.

  The relentlessness of it relents.

  Family members cross themselves as the deluge dwindles.

  The sun.

  The sun can be seen.

  Behind smoke-shaped clouds that scrape open like lace.

  They’re alive.

  The storm did not kill them.

  VII

  The sun plows the clouds to nothing. The blue of sky like a sheet of life the fiery coin of the sun just clings to. It is there, casting rays that warm the puddles which sit stagnant and bored in their sockets, children stomping them and ladies looking into them at their reflections.

  Here are the people of the town rejoicing at the storm’s quelling. Here they are in the sun of the day. The mud of the street clumps to the soles of their shoes, stains the hems of their slacks and dresses, and babies are set in it to wallow like pigs as their parents bare thrive-stained smiles—beaming at their ability to outlive the disastrous weather that had held them tight in their homes the way envelopes hold letters.

  Mom stands on her porch in the fresh morning air, and Pete, so pleased at the jolly figures in the roads, plucks his revolver from its holster and fires bullets at the sky, “Can’t kill us,” he says to God, and then all the men with guns fire heaven-headed rounds, and someone brings a bourbon bottle into the street, and they open it and pass it around like a conch shell and whoever has it says some flavor-laced toast about Jesus or their mothers and then drinks from the thing until every willing party in the town has espoused their happiness and lipped the mouth of the thing, making themselves silly with liquor.

  A free-for-all ensues. Guilty pleasures abound. Men kiss women, kiss men. Babies are held up by their ankles and swung, and their laughter emits like helium-drenched music. Souls prance in the shape of smiles. Kittens are given milk. Murm wanders blinking his one eye at the wildness of it, and girls tie flowers to his tail.

  Scraw watches from the jail cell window, “That’s my mule,” he hollers.

  “The mule is his own thing,” says Crick. He grins blackly at the affronted joy. He knows it will soon perish.

  In the puddles that glimmer with sun, the evil things are hatching.

  In sun-glittering puddles the sharks are forming.

  In the shiny puddles.

  The puddles—like mirrors toward the sky.

  Look now close at them. Here are the things to see:

  1. You in it, a reflection or refraction depending on the stillness of the water.

  2. The murk of the muddy slop or the shape of the road beneath the inches of wet depending on the stillness of the water.

  3. The disturbances. Tiny tickles of motion. Like mosquitos at first, beating their wings. But something more. It steadies. Outline of shark. So small you could swallow them with just their skin slicked by the puddles they’re pulled from. And what then would occur to you? The motherfucking shark’s progress so deep in its operation cannot be stopped by normal means, and the expansion of the organism—formulated by the blackest deceit of physics, organics, and chemistry—would continue, and you’d feel it first as an ache in your belly that would broaden like a rage or fire and maintain its trajectory of expanse until the shark gained full form, and that growth of it, the swiftest of maturations, would sever your figure beneath the force of it, your body blasting open as gore and sludge, the muck of you draping away from the gray-bodied being that would swim out of you whilst gnashing its teeth and thrashing its fins, breathing the flavor of you through its gills that would glisten with your blood.

  It is Mom who spots first the trembling puddles. At first it seems joyous to her. The shiny surfaces giggling with light.

  But then she thinks: I’d rather it be ice cream.

  That thought, that statement from the wanderer, festers.

  Maybe it’s not a lie.

  And further the puddles are disturbed, as though an earthquake shakes them, but the world is otherwise still.

  “Maybe,” hollers Mom above the drone of the people celebrating the end of the wicked storm, “we should move this party inside.”

  But, it is too late.

  On the ground, near a puddle, its face the smell of chocolate, a toddler toddles.

  See this, friend: eyes green, cheeks alight with joy. Blonde hair only ever so slightly feathered by breeze. A giggle. A tummy laugh. You ever touched a toddler’s tummy? It feels like suede-wrapped heaven. It smells like milk and hugs and handshakes from God. You see this little boy? This little white boy? If it hurts you more to see a black boy die, then make him black in your mind, I don’t care what it looks like so long as you’re uncomfortable. Instead, reader, do this. Picture for me, if you will, the child you love the most. Hold it in your head. Dress it with the form you’d least like to see killed. In this way, we have always been a team. I tell you a thing, but you spin it real in your head. So, I won’t tell you everything. Hell, make it a girl. Make it your own. Give me a child. Put it in your mind. Put it by a puddle. Put joy in its heart. I’m going to fuck it up. I’m going to unleash a magical shark on it. I’m going to turn that precious thing into a bucket of death shaped the way that hurts you most. Put that fucking child by that fucking puddle and let me kill the fuck out of it. I will strip its skin from its body, toss chunks of it at you like strips of bacon. Your baby. Make the fucking baby. I want to kill the fucking baby you’ve made in your mind. Is it there? Is it the baby?

  Now, up comes the shark.

  Now listen, I’m serious here, I’m willing to sacrifice my spot in Heaven to make you feel bad while reading this. I’ll quit drinking forever tomorrow, and I won’t jerk off to amateur porn anymore—you know the kind that’s been stolen and where the women look embarrassed and the men look eager and the light is yellow and you can nearly smell the sin—but it won’t matter anymore, because after I kill this toddler out of your imagination, God will think me reprehensible. I want this to all occur inside of you. We’re a team, okay? We’re gonna kill this little kid together.

  Kill this kid with me.

  Put it in your mind and let’s kill it.

  Just you and me.

  Just you and me and our imaginations.

  Just two people. Taking a kid and killing it in our hearts.

  It’s not real.

  It’s just.

  Let’s take this kid. This cute little kid. It’s by the puddle. And in that puddle is something dark.

  The child is innocent. The shark is heinous. Teeth. Teeth. Teeth.

  Look at a baby’s hand. It’s so soft.

  Look at a shark’s mouth. All those teeth, so sharp.

  Take that soft little hand, with those soft little fingers. Piggies. Piggies.

  Sing: this little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home.

  God, I’m gonna fucking put those cute little fingers in that fucking shark’s mouth. God, it will be fucked up. I’m gonna drag them over the teeth. Oh, shit, they will not stand a chance.

  Hahaha. Look at the baby’s face. It’s fucking crying.

  There’s blood everywhere.

  It’s trying to suck its thumb.

  Hey, dumbass, thumb’s gone.

  I fed it to a fucking shark.

  Hahahahhahahahahahahahahahaahaa.

  Oh.

  It bites the kid again.

  Oh, man.

  These motherfucking sharks are crazy.

  VIII

  Kinky Pete bolts into the sheriff’s office and races to the open cell alongside Crick and Scraw’s. He gets inside pulling the cage door closed behind him. “What the fuck is happening?” he screams.

  “I take it you’ve met the motherfucking sharks?”
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  Scraw is screaming, looking out the window at the sharks that are destroying the people of the town. Biting and thrashing, spraying the street with blood.

  A nurse shark rams its way into the jail. It slams frantically against the cage bars, trying to bite at Pete. Pete cowers, his hands over his face. Scraw cries hysterically. Crick picks at his teeth.

  Pete pulls his pistol and fires four shots at the shark. The bullets pass straight through it.

  “No use,” says Crick, “only harpoons kill them.”

  Pete looks at Crick. “Why?” he asks.

  “Because they are magical, flying sharks and that’s how they die,” he says. “Pierce ’em with a harpoon and they burst into flames and the only thing that remains of them is their jaws that drop to the ground from their burning mouths,” says Crick. “I’ve felled loads of them and have the mementos tied to my wagon just outside.”

  Pete looks sadly at his pistol. “I don’t believe it,” he says.