Keeper

Skin

10 Skin Five sharks in the scummed tank, clustered by a pipe that pulsed clean water from the bay— while the giant mechanical shark caught in his cage outside the gates turned and turned above the highway that unraveled to the Atlantic. They miss the ocean, my friend said, cool steel of the aquarium fence pressing our bellies as we leaned to watch, their tails, their gills ticking patient as the metronome over her piano, fragile box that coaxed her notes to music. My friend said even the skin of a shark could cut you: under its silver a million tiny blades. It was years before I’d touch your skin and feel how terrifying to swim that close to need—sharks’ mouths skimming the mouth of the pipe, and the mechanical shark circling, never lifted from the pole that held him, spellbound, 11 beside the highway, the unbearable sea. I understood then everything was real: shark, shark, metal and flesh, skin that was not mine, the skin that was, and how quickly blood could stray from safe channels, like snakes from a charmer’s basket lured into unforgiving air. How hungry they must have been for each other, ocean and shark, how cool and still piano keys under anyone’s hands until the pressure, and then music, your mouth on mine, and one touch to lift blood past its surface, that border dissolved. How does it feel to touch a shark? The fence split my body in two: reaching, rooted in bristling grass— and across a hundred dusky streets 12 my house, my avocado tree, all the skin I’d touch and touch—I would want that— though I didn’t know then, I still don’t, if any of it would be enough. ...