The Shark Club

by Ann Kidd Taylor

my grandmother’s highbrow resort was overrun with books. Her hotel held readings and book talks in the lobby and had its own lending-library system with a trolley that went room to room along with the housekeeping cart.

Among fish, as among humans, there seemed to be two basic schools: the venturesome and the cautious.

When I used to imagine my life at thirty, I envisioned myself doing just what I was doing now, studying sharks. But I’d pictured myself as a mother, too, teaching my child to swim in the Gulf.

There were tiny lines beginning around his eyes. But then, there was the flat place on the bridge of his nose, and his eyes were as I’d always thought of them. The electric blue of a tang fish.

“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”

“He was in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.”