Welcome to Chapter Nineteen of my life story, as told through incredible animal encounters ranging from coastal Massachusetts to the plains of Africa to the Alaskan tundra.

Every Wednesday I write and release a new chapter in this unfolding narrative, and I am often as surprised as you are by what comes out on the page. If you’re new here, and would like to catch up, you can find the previous chapters here. However, each one is presented as a stand-alone story, so you can also just dive right in- I trust you’ll put the pieces together on your own.

I have no business having even one of these ridiculous encounters in my cache, let alone several dozen. I know, I know. Alas, this is my life, laid bare for you.

Chapter Nineteen: Bare Feet and Broken Teeth

Mossell Bay, South Africa, February 2013

“You’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe….” The whispered mantra plays like a ticker tape reel in my mind until the words become a steady hand on my shoulder. I seal myself and fill my lungs before my head dips underwater, hair fanning out around my face, ghostly pale hands wrapped around a cold metal bar, knees up, feet fastidiously tucked inside the narrow cross-hatched corridor protecting my body from the frenzied, feeding sharks surrounding the cage.

I expect to be terrified, but I am not. I’m utterly transfixed. Mesmerized. It feels right that I am not breathing. I couldn’t even if I tried.

They are gorgeous. I count them: three in front of me, two below my soft, folded body- they are cruising, gliding, muscular incarnations of the sea itself; ancient, foreboding, powerful beyond anything I have ever beheld.

Close your eyes and picture a great white shark. What do you see? Open jaws, rows of serrated, menacing teeth? A breaching barrel hurling itself towards an unsuspecting seal, its ragdoll body flipping through the air, bloody and broken? Cold, empty eyes? Do you see death? Something scarred and hardened? Something other?

Yes, other. That’s it. A being we cannot see ourselves in. No empathy, no mirrored gaze, a gritty kind of grace that holds us at arm’s length; instead of inviting us to dance, their blithe bodies compel us to flee, an ancient impulse, an antimagnetic instinct to get away, and to get away fast.

Sharks remind us of everything that is cold and unfeeling in this world. They are the dark thoughts that we refuse to own, the nightmares that wake us in the night gasping for relief, dark figures circling in the periphery as we grip the sweaty bedsheets, whispering, “you’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe” into the black night.

But I have not come here to flee. I have come to excogitate my impulse to label some things dangerous and others safe. What do I know of safety, anyway? What do I know of anything at all? What happens when we stop running from the nightmares, and embrace them instead? What happens if we look into those cold eyes and see our wide-eyed faces reflected? What then?

Because floating there, with the crackling, whooshing sea caressing my ears and my hair and the spaces between my cold, naked toes, I can only summon awe. I watch the sharks tear into the meaty tuna head being dragged in front of them, and I think, I have known hunger, I have ripped into it and swallowed it whole. I see their tense flanks relax as they swim away, those predatory bodies unfurling like slow, sinuous banderoles in the dappled sea, and my thoughts return to the night before, how my taut back arched under my husband’s touch, how for a moment it was the only thing in the whole world I knew, and then the release that followed, how I melted into the sheets and I became a woman transformed, soft and satisfied, a ribbon rippling into my own sunlit sea.

Now, my head brakes through the surface of the water and I fill my lungs, my heart drumming in my ears.

Maybe these creatures are simply vessels of want, just like me. Maybe they aren’t monsters. Maybe they are just hungry.

New Mexico, 1992

I am eleven years old, sitting at a booth in a diner somewhere in the endless desert of New Mexico with my brother and my grandparents. My feet throb in last year’s patent leather Mary Janes and my neck feels much too large for the peter pan collar I am sporting for modesty, for approval. I run my finger under the edge, across my throat, and consider releasing one of the buttons so I can breathe again.

We have just left a church service in a white stucco building that was both foreign and comfortably familiar. We are on an extended road trip, driving home from Indiana in my grandparent’s RV, and we have gone to church somewhere in the country every Sunday since we left my great aunt’s house. It’s a slow trip, a break from Tucson, an escape from the tension my parent’s newly announced divorce has stirred up.

Rumor has it there is a pagan cult in town. The Rainbow People. I overheard two cotton tops in the pew behind ours talking about them before the service.

“I hear they don’t wash, and that,” her voice drops to a whisper- I lean backwards. “…that they dance naked, in the moonlight.”

A gasp. "What about the children?”

One of them clucks her tongue. Dresses shuffle; heels click on the tiled floor.

I think about naked bodies bathed in moonlight as we sing, “Nothing but the Blood.”

I have come to understand that I live in a cage of sacrificial blood. This is what protects me from sin. From wrath. From gnashing teeth. From pagan cults. This is the good news.

I’m supposed to be happy about the cage, and I suppose I am, but I can’t stop thinking about bodies in the moonlight, arms raised in supplication, wild and unbound. I wonder what that kind of freedom feels like.

I furrow my brow as I stack little half and half cartons on top of one another, my sweaty legs slipping around on the red vinyl bench. I adjust the hem of my dress, pulling it under my thighs, and look up just as two women and a girl about my age walk into the diner. Rainbow People.

I stare at them. They are magnificent. There are dreadlocks in the girl’s hair, and she has dirt under her fingernails. She is barefoot. She stands straight and unselfconscious; she belongs to herself. There is something dangerous about her, something like fire.

“Kendall, don’t stare.” My grandmother says, putting her hand on my arm.

I watch them through lowered eyelashes as they follow the hostess towards our booth, hips swaying, and I glance up just as they are passing us, my eyes locking with the girl’s. I raise a hand shyly, and she smiles. Her eyes are bold and unapologetic. I smile back at her. My chest flushes under my collar. No one sees. My family is looking out the window, ostensibly to be polite. Or because they are afraid. I don’t know.

But I look, and afterward something burns inside of my belly.

I feel her staring at the back of my head and I wonder what I look like to her.

I slowly uncross my legs and use the toe of one shoe to push down on the heel of the other one, and it drops to the floor with a soft clatter. I sigh and remove the other one, and then I secretly curl and uncurl my naked toes under the table, thinking about moonlight and wet grass.

The water stills. Five sharks still linger, despite the fact that there is now no meat left on the disembodied tuna head. But then something happens, and they begin to disappear, one by one, into the dark, sunless depths.

I am alone in the cage. Everyone else on the boat has had their fill. In and out they climb until their fingers grow numb, until the sharks no longer thrill them. But I am still here. Shivering, blue lipped, insatiable.

The captain shouts to me, “Five minutes!” and I nod, taking in a lungful of air, my eyes searching the variegated, liquid blue curtains for the shark that I sense is still out there. The water molecules are charged- I know I am not alone, that I am being watched. I know it like I have always known it.

And then I see her rising. First, a dark, scarred back, then a flash of a white underbelly. She is the mother of sharks. Bigger than any I have seen so far.

A crewmember sees her as well, and I hear a muffled shout. I don’t want to take my eyes off her, but I need a breath, so I crest the surface.

“Sharkira!” the first mate calls down to me.

"Are you serious? That’s her name?” I shout back up, and he laughs, gesturing to the water.

“She’s the boss, ya? The boss!”

I nod. The boss. I stare at the rippling surface for a moment, bobbing up and down, and empty my lungs completely, lips pursed like I am blowing through a straw, and then I inhale loud and deep, grabbing the bar at my waist and thrusting my cold body underwater.

I hear a splash as a crewmember throws the ragged fish head in the water one last time, and then she appears as if from a dark dream, cruising slowly in front of me, her black eyes searching. She marks me, pausing for a split second, and then continues on and bumps the fish head with her body. That’s it, just a bump, not even a bite. She knows what she wants, and this meager offering is beneath her.

The hair on my arms rise, and it’s not from the chill this time. She cruises back my way, giving me her undivided attention. In her eyes, I see 500 million years of evolution staring back at me. She is not vacant; she is a portal to eternity.

And then she disappears.

I pop up quickly to take a breath, buzzing with anticipation, and then I am right back down, eyes searching, back and forth, up and down.

There you are.

50 feet in front of me, she has just ascended and is swimming straight at the cage.

Primal fear surges in my chest. I look down and check my feet, making sure they haven’t slipped out the wide gaps in the back. I clasp the bar tighter and tuck my elbows in close to my body, I say a prayer for my knuckles.

20 feet. 10. Picking up speed.

My body is so tense it is shaking, every muscle bracing for impact.

And then she slams into the cage, hard. I’m knocked off the bar, scrambling to grab it again, taking account of the whereabouts of my limbs. I look up and see that she has actually latched on to the bars- I am staring down her throat. Her gums look bloody, as though this row of teeth has just recently torn through the surface.

She is shaking her head, muscles rippling, trying to get to me. I could touch her, I could uncurl a finger and drag it against a serrated tooth, I could draw my own blood. I could slam my fist down on her nose- I can see the ampullae there, the sensitive electrical organs that are, right at this moment, letting her know how fast my heart is beating. I notice that her nictitating membranes- her third eyelids- have covered her ancient eyes to protect them from blood and bone and flesh- my blood and bone and flesh.

The moment doesn’t seem to cooperate with time as I know it. I am nowhere else. I am consumed, tangled with her in a dance that breaks all linear rules. I am still there, even now, twelve years later. My lungs are still burning, begging for oxygen, her teeth are still breaking, the bars are still bending.

She wants. I want. That is all I know.

And then, after a thousand heartbeats or maybe just one, she lets go, whipping her head around and angrily pumping her caudal fin until she is hazy and distant and opaque again, lost in a fevered dream, and I burst above the water, gasping and sputtering and swearing.

“Are you okay??” Someone shouts on repeat, and I cannot talk so I throw a thumb in the air, hauling myself out of the cage, panting, and arms are pulling me the rest of the way onto the deck, eyes scanning me for injury.

I roll onto my back and begin to laugh.

“Are you hurt? What happened? The cage was shaking!” The captain exclaims, standing over me now, his eyes flitting over my soaking, shaking body.

I smile like a maniac. “I’m okay.” I say, and he locks eyes with me, and I see that he knows. He knows.

I am more than ok. I am alive. The world is full of beauty and danger; there are sharks in the water, and some are disinterested, and some are curious, and some are hungry motherfuckers, and the cage is bent and battered when it is lifted from the water, and I am a nothing but a tasty snack and I’m also the whole damn ocean.

I curl my toes on the wet deck, and I feel it all.

I am barefoot and cageless and I finally belong to myself.

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P.S. In case you’re wondering, my sweet husband sat this one out and opted instead to eat a burger on the beach, like a normal human being.