Bunny and Shark

by Alisha Piercy

  Now green. The green spins so fast it obliterates the red, black and white. You frown. This isn’t any game you know. Your heart tightens with fear, then the spinning slows, the green becoming familiar, and you wait in anticipation. And the snake swivels his head to look you in the eyes. “You left for awhile,” you tell it. You follow the snake’s movement to another table on the other side of the room. On its surface, shining instruments are laid out. Then held, one by one, by able hands. The long brown fingers of the doctor. Warm hands holding calipers, scissors, chisels, you don’t know the terms. You smell bone and smoke. Skin flap over skin flap. Vessels and nerve endings being turned off like taps. It’s a blurry view, but you see how they fold the end of your left leg into a shiny tapered baseball, but smaller, more like a very delicate horse’s hoof.

  The green snake looks you straight in the eye again. He doesn’t want you to look anymore. He holds your eyes as if to say, “Stay here.” So you can focus and not be too scared.

  What is happening to your other foot, the right foot, the one that stayed in this world? It is massaged and measured, tipped to a certain toe-to-heel angle and held tight there. Your toes are spread open as wide as a little bird’s wingspan. Then the foot is encased in something white and cold and puddingy.

  Everything at the end of your body is electric and spinning outwards. Then all goes dull. The snake disappears out the window, blending in so well with the palm leaves you see it only by its movement. But you follow its winding motion, hypnotized by it, until you realize that at some point the right foot has dried in its case. It’s become as cold and fixed as a crystal.

  After you’ve slept for what feels like many days, the case gets cracked open. The foot of this land comes of its egg. “One egg for another,” says the snake mysteriously, with its human-shaped mouth, its snake tongue pointing sheepishly out at you. It points to the left foot, the foot that is not of this land anymore, the foot that dissolved into the saliva of the shark’s gullet and became part of the island landscape.

  But the shark ate you by accident.

  You felt it right there, tearing into the base of your calf. And into your heart. Into your chances.

  What’s left? Was it by accident?

  “Right!” the snake corrects, giggling. “The stump looks like an egg!”

  That night the shark swam as usual along the night tunnels of the sea. While you laid here, your foot disintegrated cell by cell inside some yellowish-red core, among some grey, gelatinous mess of inconsequential fishes and sea garbage. Poor foreign foot finding itself there. You pray it was consumed in one night, not more. Faster than battery acid, you pray. That it slipped from one state to another, from foot to sparkles, painlessly and without gore. As a ghost might pass through a wall. That it exited through the shark’s skin and hung there above the beast, before kicking itself away. By way of more and more distant oceans. Escaping.

  In your sleep you sense the snake enter the window, cross the floor and mount the bed. It slithers across your body, up your legs. Over your pelvis. There is something horrific and tantalizing about the snake’s clean, dry movement over your hips. You groan at the thought of the young man and how you were once naked under his robe in that big glass villa. But this thought abandons you to the pain that takes over. Sudden. Excruciating. A crushing, burning, gnawing pain confused with a burning sensation around your hips, your pelvis, your vagina. You thrust yourself upwards, every lurking tingle from your foot passes up to your sex and culminates there. You don’t even have to touch it – you are burned by the singular point of pleasure, the crepe-like hand that rubs you until you cum, a shudder so blunt and shattering it gives temporary form to your foot again, before releasing into a tiny wet stream.

  And then it passes, the snake snaps like a flicked switch, and you understand that it was just a fantasy.

  Sweaty, you turn your leg from side to side to be sure no phantom has stayed. “Nothing down there, nothing there at all,” you say. The shark was a message to you, you tell yourself. That’s all. The shark had its taste of you, but then let you go.

  “Off you go now, back to the land,” it seemed to say. Like it was bored by you. Like you had lingered too long in its territory, in ocean-time, when what you were supposed to be doing was making inroads back to where you once belonged.

  “Sharks aren’t that bright,” tsk-tsks the snake, bringing you back into the focus of the room. “You think too highly of their motives. Most of their actions are blunders. There are others who will guide you now. Now you are a portrait of the intertwining of land and sea.”

  Your eyes wind around the double-helix made by the snake. He is seducing you now with this prospect.

  Day nine dead

  (The phantom’s day.)

  THE JUNGLE FALTERS in its peace, becomes a dank, crushing wilderness. Gruesome thoughts drip like pearls in your mind. They gather into hideous opaline shapes.

  Whole. And now unwhole. Broken. Partial. Cut. You lift your head up from the sweat-ringed bed to look at the stump. You wag it up and down. Cringe. You think of a baseball bat gearing up for a game, but the bat is ragged and off-time. It lacks integrity. It is disgusting to you. Mutilated. Unwholesome. Irreversible, a bloodied stump slopping all over the room.

  Go back.

  You can’t get up on it, or walk on it. You gasp. Undo it.

  Go back.

  I can’t. A whistle scream inside each thought. The words fall like spittle, like coddled egg, then spin, then ram themselves up against your forehead. Breathe, breathe. Get out of here. Anywhere else. Be elsewhere. As you calm down, the burn becomes a presence; it moves steadily up your leg and grows into a singular flame ignited in your mind: you can go back. You can kill, set fire, slash. Kill off your whole self, not just the foot.

  Then you imagine how that whole foot used to run under the table and up the leg of the bastard, or sometimes even up Coke-Bottle’s leg. It depended on your mood. You feel the foot having a life of its own, a memory. The foot dares itself into the past, arches into a shoe, walks places, takes your weight. It’s not yours anymore, but it is an entity circling the room, trying to find a place to land.

  Foot, where are you?

  How, in its last moments, it kicked so hard against the gaping mouth of the shark.

  Let the absent foot go. Ignore it. Let it figure itself out.

  You are alone. A breeze enters the room and flips a doily halfway over a hairbrush sitting on the dresser. No sounds from the family anywhere in the house. Abandoned and silent, with the drugs draining out of your system, you fall into moments of pure void until the horrors rush in again. And the foot stands above the earth suffocating you, making you want to scream one last time. But after awhile you can only grunt. Whine. Moan. Then just stay still and feel nothing.

  From a TV left on in the living room comes a deep, prophetic voice, surely an old movie:

  . . . She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seems to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.

  She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced us. Her long shadow fell to the water’s edge. Her face has a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over inscrutable purpose. A whole minute passed, and then she made a step forward . . .

  The flame of the phantom foot races up again from the stump through your calf. It makes itself known. It is stuck to you, you cannot kick it away. So you lie there feeling its power set fire to the room, and you wait.

  Day ten dead

  (In which Bunny walks for the first

  time without a foot.)

  HAVING COME t
o count on being in this blue room indefinitely, you hadn’t foreseen what might come after: the loss of euphoria and the petering out of the drug supply, the image of the snake drying up within its own curled form. But worse, your lost foot as the dark outcome of some fitful and flawed plan carried out by the bastard.

  Because the shark hadn’t worked out, hadn’t killed you the first time. Not that the bastard could know that. The paranoia of coming off drugs brings a cascade of questions. How can one man have power over creatures of the ocean? How did he know you’d tumble down into the sea that morning at dawn?

  For what seems like days you’ve been resting, simply taken care of. No need to figure things out. Your foot wrapped up in impermanent injury, which you would sort out once you felt better. Once you were on your feet again.

  You look up from an hour of staring at the palms, waiting for the snake to return with its message, and the young man appears. Your first impulse is to cry. He greets you like an old friend, not his lover.

  “How you doin’?” You notice how his accent has shifted. How he carries his weight differently, his body more relaxed and in tune with the surroundings. You smell his skin as he leans over to adjust the sheet, a rich mix of clean sweat and soap. Everyone washes so often here, you’ve noticed.

  “I feel like I’m nowhere. Or in somebody else’s dream.”

  “Well that’s good, I guess. No harm in floating for awhile. Lettin’ it sink in, what happened to you. Do you understand it?”

  “You mean, that I’m lucky I wasn’t all eaten up?” You can’t manage to smile so the young man is beaming on your behalf.

  “Well everyone is considering you’re special because of that, yeah. And that it was your foot that got taken. Here that means something.”

  From the abstraction of your talk with the young man, which is a comfort to you, to the material, grim reality: a foot, gone. It hits you again – it hits you because the phantom foot has reared up again, angled as it is in a furious clamp of pain.

  “What could it possibly mean,” you say, shaky and trembling, on the verge of tears. The young man puts a hand on your shoulder and you want more than anything to shrivel up so you’re tiny enough to fit within that hand. “There is nothing meaningful about an accident that severs a body.” Your words coming out tinged with venom even though you’d love to believe him. You’d love to return to the time when you thought the dolphins had chosen you, when you thought the sea was your ally and would never cause you harm.

  “Well, they’re sayin’ it’s a form of crossing over. But without having to go all the way. That you’re supposed to stay in this world but now have access to some other place.”

  You have no idea what he could be talking about. “Hmmm,” you mumble, noncommittal. If only you could get up and talk to him properly. His look is sympathetic, it pains you to not be able to get better from that look. But you don’t want his pity. And you can’t help him to help you. So you prefer to be alone and, acknowledging your shooing hand, he nods on his way out, and you put your head in your palms and let yourself cry hard.

  / / /

  You are encouraged by the women, in particular Thule, to get up and move around with a crutch. So you take it from them, though wonder why they don’t give you two. Why not a pair? They watch expectantly. As you become vertical, their hands dart out at you with each uncertain jerk of your body. For the first time in days you face the other side of the room. The back wall is covered in wallpaper of a Miami sunset. Two crooked palm trees in silhouette seem to be leaning out towards the pink ocean, as if their roots might give. Drips from the ceiling have stained the paper, and the corners pull away from the wall, showing gaps of blue paint behind it. You fix your eye on the ball of orange sun in the distant Miami scene – the place you were supposed to swim to, but didn’t – as the white bulb, the egg of your bandage, swings violently, throwing you off balance. You slow down to reel it in, to make it lurch less.

  “Fuck it,” you whisper, grabbing at random the hands that flap and lunge at your sides, trying to catch you. Their touch is light, their hold not altogether there, and they pull away, wanting to help you to find your own way. Verbal reassurances fly up around you and drift into the other rooms of the blue house. Through snatches of conversation you hear about “a foot that will come.”

  Whispered: “magic” and “lady.” Then put together: “lady-magic.”

  “You just have to keep up your shape and your muscles,” Thule is saying, as you hop a little, “so when the foot comes, you’ll be ready to walk with the grace of a lady deserving like yourself. With your head high.” Finally you lean on a young girl who, unlike the other women, is willing to take your weight.

  Do they mean a prosthetic? Each time it’s mentioned, they praise the maker so highly, show such reverence for him – her? – that you wonder if there isn’t something more behind all this, perhaps a political motive? All you can do is nod and stare and agree. And wait. Several times a day you look at the bandaged hump but it is rare that you direct emotions of any kind, hope or anger – worst of all, humiliation – towards it. The doses of morphine help, but are infrequent, and you are weary of falling back into any drug-conditioned darkness.

  Innocent white bulb, so quiet at the foot of the bed that you coo to it, tell it to shush, say it’ll be fine. You feel the sparkling mass of stars taking the exact shape of the missing foot. Shut your eyes, let it tingle itself out, it will. It usually does. Then all, including the green snake who sits at your ear in these times, agree there is nothing there. That the foot has flown away. That it will lead the way.

  The young man speaks little when he comes, but you hear him going over things with other family members in the kitchen, and then on the phone with his wife. He came here with his own concerns, private concerns, you remember.

  To cheer you up he reminds you of the party on the island.

  “You’re still coming? Everything is on rush so that you can walk into that party on my arm.” You hold his hand in yours and wonder why he cares so much.

  Lastly, he hands you your NAUI card and walks back into the kitchen.

  Day eleven dead

  (In which Bunny dances.)

  GREAT FANFARE IS PROMISED the day your new foot is to arrive – the same day the young man has invited his family over for a reunion.

  The reunion is an extended family gathering, a celebration for the young man who has come home, finally, to choose his plot of land. You know of these lands: a span of beachfront, ancestral territory once owned by emancipated slaves, lands passed through generations until the entire area gained some quixotic, untouchable status. The law still can’t intervene on family leases: they remain intricate, hidden, indecipherable. So the lands stay in family hands, even if, like the young man, the inheritor lived far from the island for decades. What matters is that you were born here. They say the island remembers all of its people, and that whenever a person once tied to the island returns, the island expands, makes more of itself. This time for the young man.

  As things stir outside, you feel you begin to occupy a special place within the family.

  You are helped into a bath. Thule props your leg onto a wooden chair and insists on washing your hair, at the same time soaping up your back with some scratchy mittens, then pouring hefty buckets of warm water over your head. You blink through the suds, refreshed.

  “What about your friends, lady?” Thule says, scrubbing big circles up and down your arms now. “Or family?”

  “My friends, well, wouldn’t be able to come.” That was clear. That line had been drawn. As for your sisters who live in the States, you don’t know why you didn’t try to contact them. It’d been so long. You thought you’d try to sort it out first your own way.

  “No use calling them now, Thule. Try to get myself used to this new body first. To walking around and being on my own. It’s not so bad, is it?”

  “Nah, nah, you’re gonna be just fine. But I’m not clear on where your home is, is a
ll.” She rinses your hair one last time. “Don’t think about that today lady. We’re thinking about it though, you should know that. You call me when you want out of this bath.”

  You nod to her. Your sisters wouldn’t have a clue, is why. How to deal with the bastard or Coke-Bottle. The only solution would be to escape. But to escape at their hands, you couldn’t take that: to be a dependent in some bourgeois house full of your nieces and nephews, where you’d have no purpose.

  You draw the razor up over your good leg, fast, like you’re used to doing it, but take it slowly around the left calf pushing the head of the razor in to get under the bandages. Wash your pits, then your privates.

  You come out on the crutch to an army of beautifully adorned women. They seat you and comb the tangles out of your hair, put cream on you, cut and file your nails, get you into a new-looking bra and panties – someone must have bought them for you so you mouth a “thank you” to the group at large. The red silk jumpsuit hangs in the room like the poster of a once-loved celebrity. Obviously that’s what you’ll be wearing. They’ve decided. It’s been pressed and the ribbons arranged along the leg to make neat thin bows – the last, you find as they pull it on over you, needs to be undone for your bandage hump to pass through. Lots of tsks, and “Never mind, we’ll get it on.” They want you to cooperate, to be a good sport. A young girl cuts through the primping hands with the blare of a hairdryer.

  “Alright,” you say, “go for it.” She pushes your head forward, to position it upside down, and you feel the sting of metal heat at the base of your neck. Then hairspray and a stiff brush. The grandmother pours thick red Campari into glasses that the granddaughter passes around. You toss your head, your hair now a hot, blonde balloon. The taste of Campari puts you instantly in a good mood. A party mood.