Bunny and Shark by Alisha Piercy

without gore. As a ghost might pass through a wall. That it exited through the shark’s skin and hung there above the beast, before kicking itself away. By way of more and more distant oceans. Escaping.
    In your sleep you sense the snake enter the window, cross the floor and mount the bed. It slithers across your body, up your legs. Over your pelvis. There is something horrific and tantalizing about the snake’s clean, dry movement over your hips. You groan at the thought of the young man and how you were once naked under his robe in that big glass villa. But this thought abandons you to the pain that takes over. Sudden. Excruciating. A crushing, burning, gnawing pain confused with a burning sensation around your hips, your pelvis, your vagina. You thrust yourself upwards, every lurking tingle from your foot passes up to your sex and culminates there. You don’t even have to touch it – you are burned by the singular point of pleasure, the crepe-like hand that rubs you until you cum, a shudder so blunt and shattering it gives temporary form to your foot again, before releasing into a tiny wet stream.
    And then it passes, the snake snaps like a flicked switch, and you understand that it was just a fantasy.
    Sweaty, you turn your leg from side to side to be sure no phantom has stayed. “Nothing down there, nothing there at all,” you say. The shark was a message to you, you tell yourself. That’s all. The shark had its taste of you, but then let you go.
    â€œOff you go now, back to the land,” it seemed to say. Like it was bored by you. Like you had lingered too long in its territory, in ocean-time, when what you were supposed to be doing was making inroads back to where you once belonged.
    â€œSharks aren’t that bright,” tsk-tsks the snake, bringing you back into the focus of the room. “You think too highly of their motives. Most of their actions are blunders. There are others who will guide you now. Now you are a portrait of the intertwining of land and sea.”
    Your eyes wind around the double-helix made by the snake. He is seducing you now with this prospect.

Day nine dead
    (The phantom’s day.)
    THE JUNGLE FALTERS in its peace, becomes a dank, crushing wilderness. Gruesome thoughts drip like pearls in your mind. They gather into hideous opaline shapes.
    Whole. And now unwhole. Broken. Partial. Cut. You lift your head up from the sweat-ringed bed to look at the stump. You wag it up and down. Cringe. You think of a baseball bat gearing up for a game, but the bat is ragged and off-time. It lacks integrity. It is disgusting to you. Mutilated. Unwholesome. Irreversible, a bloodied stump slopping all over the room.
    Go back.
    You can’t get up on it, or walk on it. You gasp. Undo it.
    Go back.
    I can’t. A whistle scream inside each thought. The words fall like spittle, like coddled egg, then spin, then ram themselves up against your forehead. Breathe, breathe. Get out of here. Anywhere else. Be elsewhere. As you calm down, the burn becomes a presence; it moves steadily up your leg and grows into a singular flame ignited in your mind: you can go back. You can kill, set fire, slash. Kill off your whole self, not just the foot.
    Then you imagine how that whole foot used to run under the table and up the leg of the bastard, or sometimes even up Coke-Bottle’s leg. It depended on your mood. You feel the foot having a life of its own, a memory. The foot dares itself into the past, arches into a shoe, walks places, takes your weight. It’s not yours anymore, but it is an entity circling the room, trying to find a place to land.
    Foot, where are you?
    How, in its last moments, it kicked so hard against the gaping mouth of the shark.
    Let the absent foot go. Ignore it. Let it figure itself out.
    You are alone. A breeze enters the room and flips a doily halfway over a hairbrush sitting on the dresser. No sounds from the family anywhere in the house. Abandoned and