When White Caps Fall

'And remember, no straining yourself, that means no heavy lifting.’

It had been painful when his appendix burst, but the doctor’s constant reminders had become monotonous, and Tyrell Jones began to think about what the next day of work held in store. He didn’t have to think hard, seeing as every day held the same uniform activities as the last, but going through his schedule calmed his dull mind. He woke, and he worked. He went home, and he flicked the TV to the daily news as he sat in his ratty recliner and slowly drifted into sleep while a plate of dinner cooled by his side. Wake up and repeat.

It seemed boring, and it was. Tyrell didn’t live an exciting life, and he didn’t realize it either. He spent every moment thinking forward to the next day, where he would repeat the process as his life trekked forward, losing its race to a tortoise.

His job wasn’t anything to write home about. Tyrell worked alongside hundreds of other throwaway employees who scrambled to scoop up any extra hours that could help them meet a living wage. However, Tyrell was less than conscious of his expendability; he was too focused on loading and unloading the neverending trucks that pulled up behind the aquarium from nine to five every day. He was as happy as his job would allow him, and Tyrell found an ecstatic excitement every morning as he drove to work, knowing that soon he would be able to spend the day gazing down at Susan.

He found his happiness as he watched Susan, the eighteen-hundred pound Great White, as she snaked through her tank. Susan’s presence freed Tyrell, ever since he began working at the aquarium. He would spend endless hours watching as the water crashed against her scales, and the white caps mesmerized him as they splashed back down into the pool. She was an elegant creature, and she was uncontainable, doing what she pleased as she swam.

So that’s what Tyrell thought of as he winced from the stitches that stretched in his lower belly. Susan sailed beneath him, her body bobbing through the water, waiting for Tyrell, who lifted the seventy-pound box of chum off the cart and set it on the iron grates above her home. ‘No heavy lifting,’ but it was Tyrell’s job to take care of this boundless animal, and a few torn stitches weren’t going to kill him.

The day ended as usual, and Tyrell went home, turned the TV to the same stodgy news channel, and began to heat his leftovers. His stomach growled for nourishment, but at the sight of the same reheated meal, it quieted. He forced the food down anyways, the appendectomy wasn’t cheap, and even if it was, Tyrell didn’t have the funds to feast on anything of excitement. The news droned on as Tyrell sat in his chair that poked with broken springs and slipped into a comfortless sleep.

…

The next day brought about the same chores, but Tyrell didn’t gaze at Susan the way he used to. She moved with the same elegance, but the fire it once held died out, and the beast’s fervor had diminished. The last night had set a virus into his heart, and he couldn’t rid his mind of what he had heard on the TV. The box, which in Tyrell’s mind expressed only truths, had spoken, and the words it had uttered were dire. In aquariums around the world, the Great White population continued to grow smaller as they died in captivity. Susan wasn’t the unstoppable force she had once been; instead, she was a captive in her own tank.

Like every day before, Tyrell spent his hours staring into the tank but no longer watched Susan. Instead, he studied the water that held her prisoner. The evil entity forever surrounded her, and it teased her with the life she would never live. The exciting intensity Susan once moved with had been reduced to a slow crawl through her dismal home. Tyrell poured pounds of chum into her water, but the blood no longer exploded in its clouds of red, and Susan’s thrashing was now mandatory, opposed to the once elegant display of power. She wasn’t a shark; she was a goldfish waiting for her inevitable death.

The following days kept their homogenous nature, but they began to wear on Tyrell Jones, who no longer had his escape. Each hour was a clone of the last, and he could see it as the minutes disappeared into one continuous blob of time. It was a ceaseless cycle with no escape unless he made one.

Nearly two weeks had passed before Tyrell decided he was going to make a change. Susan wasn’t happy; he could see that now, and he wasn’t going to stand for it. At the base of it, Tyrell had grown to love her. It was nothing strange, but it was a love that fueled him. Tyrell needed to take care of Susan. It was his job, and he would do anything to see that she would be alright.

That’s what brought Tyrell to hide in the maintenance room above the entrance to the shark tank. He slunk in the shadows long after closing (it wasn’t a difficult task, security did the bare minimum because what sane criminal had the desire to rob a carbon copied aquarium?) and waited for hours on end until he was certain the building was void of any other living creature besides the fish.

The shadows curved around him like the water along Susan’s body as Tyrell stepped forward and onto the catwalk above the lapping waves. Susan circled him from below as Tyrell walked across the metal plates towards the maintenance closet. He grabbed the knob; the door was rarely kept locked, but to Tyrell, who had earned a large ring of keys from his years of work, it didn’t matter. The handle turned easily, and the door swung open after it, revealing a throne room of gear.

Wet suits and masks piled up to the ceiling, and Tyrell had to squeeze to the back of the room to reach his prize. It was an enormous sling, folded onto itself several times, and Tyrell pushed himself to pull the thing free. His stomach screamed in rage, and he could feel his shirt dampen by the time he finally got the sling out of the closet. Damnit, he had ripped the stitches, and the medical bill to fix it was going to be much worse than a thin slice off his paycheck, but if it meant saving Susan, it was worth it.

The truck’s wheels screeched as Tyrell slammed the brakes a second before the back end went careening into the garage of the aquarium, and with blood dripping out from underneath his shirt, he opened the steel doors of Susan’s red, soon-to-be, home. The oval transportation tub was heavy, and it did nothing to help his torn stitches as Tyrell dragged it from the steel container and began to fill it with water. He had never moved a shark before, that was a little above his pay grade, but he had studied the people who did and felt confident that he was performing the steps correctly.

The sling was out, the truck was in place, and the tub was full; all Tyrell needed was to get Susan from her tank to the tub, and they would be home free. He stumbled back inside, water splashing onto the floor as he pulled the tub behind him. Tyrell could feel his head lighten as more blood seeped through the reopened incision. He stopped short of the edge of the tank and let the tub rest.

The wet sling was slippery underhand, and Tyrell had to readjust before he was able to pull the hunk of rubber towards the miniature crane that drooped over the tank’s ocean. Although he had seen these sorts of operations be performed, Tyrell had never seen a Great White move. The aquarium only had room for one shark as high a caliber as Susan was, and Tyrell hadn’t been transferred to her tank until well after her arrival. Usually, the sharks in question were lifted in the sling by a group of people then quickly moved to their temporary home, but there was no way several people could lift Susan, much less Tyrell on his own. That’s what the crane was for.

Tyrell had never seen the crane in use, but how hard could it be? All he had to do was properly hook the sling (he had been trained to do so in case of emergencies. Check). Sit in the crane’s operating seat (that was simple enough, especially with the condition his stomach was in. Check). And lower the sling into Susan’s water (trial and error had never failed him before. Check again).

Tyrell had to steady himself as he moved towards the crane, which sat like a flamingo posed for the desperate watchers begging for beauty. By then, the stitches had fully given way to a flood of blood that escaped him, and it combined with the spilled water underneath like a pair of polar opposite magnets.

The sweat, tears, and blurriness plagued Tyrell’s eyes as he tried to lift the sling over his head. He winced, but not for the last time, as the slash in his stomach continued to stretch open, and Tyrell could feel his vision disappear in this pain.

He wasn’t sure if it was the loss of blood, the increased fog, or simply the sting of his sweat, but Tyrell didn’t realize he was falling until he hit the water. One moment he was stretching towards the crane’s kiss, and the next, he was flailing beneath the water, begging for a taste of pure air. Despite the haze, Tyrell’s eyes sprung open and were immediately met with a wall of water. He tried to look around, but it was like looking through the wrong end of a magnifying glass, and the red cloud that grew around him did little to help. It was his blood, he knew that, but Tyrell was too focused on escaping the suffocating water to concentrate on it.

The fear that stabbed his heart was an alien sensation. It was the first real emotion he could remember feeling in a long time, and it did a magnificent job to puncture the bubble that was his rerun of a life. That fear clouded Tyrell’s head, forcing his thoughts to tunnel, only thinking about ridding himself of that feeling. However, that tunnel quickly exploded.

A pain smashed the vexing sting of Tyrell’s stomach and instantly took control of his thoughts. His vision pursued its course of impairment, making it difficult to see the shadow that circled below, but there was no mistaking the agony as it shot towards him and tore another chunk of flesh from his abdomen.

His lungs were magma, and his limbs were putty as Tyrell clutched to his shredded stomach that gradually let everything of importance leak out. There had never been worse pain, but Tyrell’s mind drifted away in peace as he felt his splashing body throw the water up into its wild white caps that disrupted Susan’s once calm tank.