The One That Got Away

Carefree and almost too relaxed, the woman had drifted out beyond the shallows, her body floating supine. Her arms were crossed behind her head to keep it afloat atop the salty sea.

Ashley was barely aware of anything other than her state of contentment, feeling the ocean's crisp coolness soothing the sun's fiery sting upon her suntanned skin. In a harmonious contrast, the sun's warmth tempered the chill of the water.

Beginning to rouse, she noticed the sun's glare was no longer blinding, now hanging low in the sky, on the verge of setting. The sight was always breathtaking, the sun dipping below the undulating horizon like a fiery orb sinking into the ocean's expanse. Typically, as the sun vanished, the sky would transform into a canvas of gold, pink, and purple hues. Soon, night would fall, shrouding the seascape in darkness.

A disturbing recollection surfaced—she remembered a radio news report from earlier that day about a shark sighting the previous evening, not far north of her current location. As clarity returned, Ashley realized she shouldn't be alone in the water, especially at this time, when sharks were known to prowl closer to shore in search of food.

Opening her eyes alertly now Ashely lifted her head out of the water and pulled herself into an upright position with head and shoulders above the water. She scanned the deserted beach.

Almost as if on cue, a violent splash disrupted the calm surface some distance further out from where Ashley bobbed, just like a sitting duck. Repositioning her polarized sunglasses, she scanned the waters around where the disturbance was and was instantly gripped with terror. Her heart pounded, her breath halted, and it seemed impossible for her to move as she noticed a very large, very dark shadow gliding steadily towards her.

There was no supposing it could be anything other than what this was. Just moments before, her mind had been a blank slate, so the sudden recollection of the voice from the news report was startling. It was what had snapped her out of a semi-conscious state just seconds ago. Perhaps it was God, or maybe a sixth sense, or even the universe giving her warning, albeit a bit too late, to get out of the water before she became fish food.

She swung around and looked back towards the shore. There was no way in hell she’d be able to outswim a shark over such a distance. Treading water and spinning frantically, she quickly analyzed her chances of swimming to the end of the groin that jutted some 30 meters from the beach, out into the ocean. She was almost parallel with the groin end and only about 20 meters away from it. She would be unlucky to not reach it but unlikely to be able to haul herself out of the water in time.

Her thoughts remained calm even as the menacing shape meandered steadily towards her.

Two seagulls had been floating nearby but now took flight, gliding on the breeze that had just picked up. The same breeze carried the distant hum of the Surf Club's dinghy's outboard motor, a sound she recognized as the vessel that patrolled this stretch of coast throughout the summer days. It sounded hopelessly far away, and they were beyond her field of vision.

It was as though real life was playing in slow motion.

Ashley looked back at the beach to where her beach bag lay, well out of reach of even a high tide. Would someone find it and hand it in? Would her family come looking for her when she didn't arrive home for dinner and find it and raise an alarm? Oh no, she thought in dismay, what if they think I've intentionally killed myself? The number of times that she had joked that she was going to swim to Rottnest. It was a tongue-in-cheek statement because everybody knew that she likely drown long before she reached the little island 40 kilometers to the west.

"I'm not running," she declared firmly, "I'll stand and fight."

She couldn't help feeling a mix of admiration and a surge of courage over the fact that she was still alive at this point. Having never truly contemplated such a scenario, Ashley had assumed her heart would stop long before any creature got a mouth full of her.

She steadied herself and was prepared to carry out the death-defying plan that she had devised in the moment as her only chance of survival. She ran through it one last time in her mind. She would be ready, and she would punch the shark on its nose with all of her might. Ashley had heard that people had frightened sharks off and saved their own lives by doing this. It was her only hope of survival.

She was all too aware that its teeth were three rows deep and razor sharp and would shred her hands to ribbons if the punch landed below its snout. If it landed much above, she would then incorporate fingers, gouging deep into its eyes to deter it from making another approach. Then, she would make for a specific rock at the end of the groin that maybe, just maybe she could lift herself onto out of the water. This is assuming she still had her arms and legs.

This was it. The great dark shadow was almost upon her now. The moment of truth.

It got to be within a couple of meters from her when it slowed to an unexpected stop and the great creature lifted its head from the water. Ashley was in shock and confusion made her brain whirl in a dizzying manner. She never saw those razor-sharp teeth lunging at her as she imagined she would. The thing that she noticed most before she plunged beneath the surface were some thick black whiskers.

Large bubbles erupted on the surface as just below, Ashley's body shook and convulsed and she tumbled in somersaults midway down to the ocean floor.

She suddenly shot to the surface, breaking it with an unnatural scream. Her voice high-pitched and hysterically squealed at her adversary, "Hellooooo buddy!!!!"

These large black eyes filled with alarm at the sound of this human shrieking like a siren. As quickly as the sleek seal had approached, it disappeared again diving under the water and back in the direction that it had come.

Ashley wanted to kiss the seal she had been so relieved that’s what it was. But in its sudden absence, her need to get back to the shore quickly had barely eased. She wanted to collapse but that would have to wait until she was well out of water. She quickly pushed off doing as fast a free-style stroke as she could muster.

She had just survived a shark attack purely because the 'shark' had been a resident seal who was assuredly more traumatized by this encounter than she would ever realise.

As she crawled out of the water and collapsed onto the white sand, she spotted the seal leaping out of the waves in an arc and plunging back into the sea. Drawing in a ragged breath, Ashley began to chuckle. She couldn’t get over the way she jumped to the conclusion that she had. How silly, she thought, to think I was going win in an attack by a shark. The smile that lit up her face as she watched the seal burst out of the water one last time, froze in horror and disbelief.

The reality of the situation struck her and she realised why the seal had come tearing towards the beach a few moments earlier. As the little black seal burst upwards out of the water as though it were a bird, the gigantic shadow beneath it rose to the surface and there were the rows of razor-sharp teeth she had expected to see earlier. She glimpsed them for merely a second as that was long enough for this predator to take one large chomp of the seal in mid-air before both fish disappeared entirely.