Little Transient Creatures

A man stood on the shore of a grand, calm sea, where even the edge of the water did not lap but hung with a curled edge over soft sand. Ahead, the blues and greens softly became the reflected orange-pink of the sky, so gradually that the horizon could not be seen. The sea simply became the sky, and continued over his head, seamlessly fading into black.

Then, before him, a strange creature appeared on the surface of the water: a featureless, grey, triangle-shaped animal which hatched, made a soft sweeping curve through the sherbert canvas before him, and then died by becoming smaller, smaller, and then it was gone. The man marvelled at the little animal he’d seen, and thought about how he could learn from its smooth, gentle movements. More and more of these little animals hatched and died before him, as he stood pondering.

He thought about how he was like these little transient creatures, which were born and died in so little time, were simple and soft, and how each one made a unique and graceful curving shape as it moved through its life, then it was gone. He hoped to be so graceful.

Then, a fisherman came by carrying his quarry: a reef shark which he’d brought in by line further down the way. The man congratulated him, and wondered at the strange creature in the fisherman’s arms. Then, he told the fisherman about the odd animals he had seen. The fisherman, laughing, held up his shark and pointed at the dorsal fin, which was grey and triangular, and came out of the water when the shark came too shallow. In fact, he had probably seen the same shark over and over again, and it was the same fin each time.

The man marvelled at this, and wondered if there was a shark beneath him, and if when it dove, he would be gone. And when it came shallow, it would make something like him again, carving a new, graceful shape to its death. Every fin-in-the-air, every breaching, was a single display along the perfect mirror of the water’s surface.

When the fin is out of sight, in the depths, then does it only belong to the shark?