Shark Heart

by Emily Habeck

Suddenly, a gossamer prescience too delicate to name floated before him, and then it became him. This was the place: his life’s true destination, the point of work, fortitude, hope, and valor. Lewis understood everything now. And then, faster than the insight came to him, it faded, and he was once again a man with an incurable disease who loved his life, his wife. In the same moment, awe replaced Wren’s usual mental activity, trying to know, do, plan, and control. Wren was simply a human being existing on the surface of Planet Earth, and he, and he, and he—Man of Sea. It just was. They were, at once, thirty-five and a hundred years old.

Lewis began by softening his students into a new play, telling them all about the human significance of the work, its writer, and the trials they experienced while writing the play; how, in performing it, they became a part of its legacy; it was an honor, he said, to take lines, the playwright’s distilled vulnerability, and make them one’s own. He would say acting is paying homage to the visionaries who had the courage to go for it; acting is freeing the parts of oneself living secretly, ashamedly, in memory and regret; acting is living at the height of one’s emotional possibilities; acting is crafting reality in the name of pretend; acting is the one time when no one suffers the consequences of truth.

Now that she was a woman, would pregnancy reduce her entire identity to mother? What a tragedy it is, being a woman, she thought with relief after another negative pregnancy test. I would rather be a million other things.

All the hours he spent theorizing about magic seemed so naive now. The main ingredient in transformation was not magic. It was pain.

Suddenly, with such insatiable yearning, Wren wanted to fill her lungs. She did not choose to be born, but she chose, in this moment, to live.