How It Feels to Be Attacked by a Shark

What I’m Reading: 




How It Feels to Be Attacked by a Shark: 

And Other Amazing Life-or Death Situations 

edited by Michelle Hamer




Thirty-seven first-person accounts of being in difficult
situations, from weighing 500 pounds to choking on a cheeseburger. I, of
course, grabbed it for the shark attack and found several other stories from,
shall we say, the Night Side of Nature:




-attacked by a crocodile

-mauled by a Rottweiler

-debilitated by dengue fever.




These are fascinating accounts, full of details you  don’t usually hear about. The shark victim,
for instance, mentions trying to slow his heartbeat when he saw the great white
approach because he assumed the shark would sense it. The Rottweiler victim
frankly mentions having been bitten on her breast. The crocodile victim notices
the “beautiful golden-flecked eyes” of her attacker.




The stories are brief; I found myself devouring them like
potato chips. And then I took a bite that made me spit: “How It Feels to Be
Abducted by Aliens.” Surprisingly, I here encountered yet another bite on the
breast; our narrator bites in self-defense as a couple of lady aliens try to
take liberties with him, even though, as he says, one of them has hair “like
Farrah Fawcett’s when she was in Charlie’s Angels.” Having bitten off the alien’s
nipple, the gentleman is later asked “if I checked for it in my bowel
movements, but that never crossed my mind.”




It didn’t really seem worth going on after that story. I
leafed ahead and found the next story was called “How It Feels to Be an Animal
Psychic.” Yeah, I’m quitting here.