Hammerhead

The child, her hair bleached white from the ocean and her skin darkened by the sun, waddles on the hot, thick Hawaiian sand. Small waves lap against the shore. The sun illuminates the water and makes it evermore so clear. The little girl finally makes her way down the steep berm and into the water. The water kaleidoscopic with colored coral heads of green, blue and purple feels soft and warm on the girl’s stomach. The little girl wallows in the water and stares down past her bright yellow bikini and her painted toes. Parrot fish, trigger fish, box fish. All visible with the naked eye. Above the water feels deserted, below a city buzzes. Turtles graze and sleep on the reef’s shelf, fish dart this way and that, eels hide in their holes with motionless eyes, urchins wiggle their spines. The girl dives down and the silence of the bay soon transforms to the songs of humpbacks and the clicks of nearby dolphins. The girl emerges and floats on her back. The girl relaxed and refreshed, the bay calm and clean.

Thirty years pass. Air travel, tourism, skin cancer awareness all boom.

The little girl, still with bleached hair and tanned skin, now a woman carries a little girl with slightly less blonde hair on her hip. The woman trudges through the sand past women furiously rubbing sunscreen on their pale children, past men blowing up every imaginable variation of a floatie, past trash wrappers and cigarette butts. The air with its synthetic smells appears foggy and fills with the clatter of foreign tongues, screaming children, and the Pshhh of spray sunscreen. The woman plops down her bag on the first available patch of sand. The girl wiggles out of the woman’s arms and fishes out her snorkel and mask. The woman grabs hers, yellowing with age, and they run to where the waves hit shore. A film rests on top of the water, and beneath it a cloudy soup. The woman holds her daughters hand as they swim out towards the edge of the bay. The water becomes clearer with every stroke. The once colorful, lively reef now gray and motionless. As the two reach the edge of the bay, life returns. The little girl lets go of her mom’s hand and they both dive down. The woman follows a turtle as it tucks under a shelf for its afternoon nap. The little girl swims towards shore slightly as she tries to touch a parrot fish and then she suddenly stops. She pops her head out of the water and yells, “Mommy come look at this there’s a shark! It’s so cute, it’s a baby hammerhead shark.”

In a matter of minutes the slick with sunscreen snorkelers have hustled out of the water – the word shark incites panic even to non-English speakers, the fog dissipates, the din disappears, the water clears. The woman and the girl follow the shark as it heads in towards shore then back out again. It swims by trigger fish chewing on coral bits, past clown fish popping in and out of their guarded homes, and past puffer fish on the verge of puffing. They watch it for hours until it swims off into the blue expanse beyond the reef.

The woman, the girl, the bay full energy.