Read Water from Stone - a Novel for Free Online

wait.
    Sara holds up her hand, forcing Jack to stop. “You need to hear this,” she says.
    Jack feels Lindsey’s pull. He thinks she must be scared and he needs to be with her. “Please.”
    “Jack,” Sara clears her throat. “Jack,” she begins again.
    Jack watches Sara square her shoulders and he thinks that somehow he should brace himself for more, though he can think of nothing more devastating than the news she has already given him.
    “The baby,” Sara says, “your baby, is missing.”
    Three
    Mar.
    They say that Sail Rock is where the hammerhead sharks live. They say it is where they go to breed. Its massive south face slopes downward, tucking in where solid meets liquid, just as a cloth sail would when billowing in a stiff breeze.  The rock rises out of the water rather than simply sitting in it, solid. There. Its base, a mammoth mast that anchors the sail to the ocean floor, descends into the depths without so much as an incline to grant it grace.
    It is about this pillar that the hammerheads swarm, swirling in a maelstrom of savage lust, monster bodies pushing, shoving at the scent of blood. And, just as it begins, it is over, the meal shredded, torn, devoured. Only now, there is a slight change, a heightened sensibility, maybe even a nervous excitement as goggle eyes search to and fro for the next victim, the next flesh to rip and tear from sinew, from bone. Distances are now maintained, as it would take almost nothing, a slight flick of the tail to the left or maybe to the right, almost nothing for them to turn on each other, mother against daughter, father devouring son, blood lust and greed filling their meager brains where affection and nurture might have been.
    Divers go to Sail Rock. Actually pay money for the chance to watch the beasts, to suck up a few thousand pounds of compressed air, all the while pretending to themselves that they themselves look like nothing more than another piece of coral, made of something hard and inedible, not at all like something so sad, so pathetic, as flesh and blood. Wanting to believe, but not quite getting there, that they are safe, that these monsters won’t turn, not on a tourist. Not on the source of livelihood for these islands. Finance, after all, rules the world. The dive must be safe or it wouldn’t be allowed. Commerce would be threatened by a tourist getting hurt, the dive company would not have brought them here if it wasn’t safe. Hoping that thinking it will make it so, but wanting more than anything for the dive to be over, to be in a bar somewhere, able ever after to drop a line, start a conversation with ‘yeah, I dove with hammerheads, big motherfuckers, too.’ This 30 minutes of water time giving you a story, marking you as somehow different, superior.
    But then, you’re young, you’re on your honeymoon, you got the girl and now the story would be the cap of ten days of sex and sunshine. The part you can talk about. Only, she has sinus problems and the dive company won’t take her, won’t risk having to bail at the wrong moment. And so she sits by the pool all morning, admires how when the light hits it at just the right angle, the ring throws off thousands of sparks of light. Thinks about babies and baseball games, makes plans of how to be a great, no, a fantastic, wife, a spectacular one, a model soccer mom. Drifts off as the heat of the sun loosens every last muscle, numbs the mind. Gives in to the sensuous heat of the day. Mmmmmmm …
    And later, when the boat comes back, she’s asleep in the liquid light, unaware there’s a fuss, the hotel’s general manager coming to get her, to wake her up, dazed from languid hours of sleeping in the sun, to lead her away, back to her room, past all the people who are staring at her, talking about her, pointing at her, making the confusion and sudden fear in her belly grow and expand upon itself until it claws and strangles at her throat.
    And then it is not she, it is you and your room is cold