Once the Shore by Paul Yoon Page B

She reached for his shoulders, to see the bruises there, but he stepped away. “You didn’t find one?”
    “No, child,” she said. “Not today.”
    His reaction was unexpected.
    “Then you’re no good,” he said, and crossed the street and threw her gift into the dirt. She gripped the door and in silence watched as he raised his leg high and cracked the shell and ground it into the dirt, twisting his hips, until the shell was powder.

    Ahrim knew of only a few incidents involving sharks on Solla Island. The first occurred when she was in her adolescence, when on the weekends entire villages would flock to the sea, as though they had never entered it in their lives. Some were bold, swimming farther and farther, and although she didn’t remember the man, what returned of him was a foot trailed by a cloak of deep red like some lackadaisical comet gone astray.
    Ahrim was nearby when it washed up to shore and she remembered the tattoo around the ankle—which was how they identified him—an image of a swordfish, wrapped around the skin so that it faced its tailfin, the ink lines iridescent from the water and the sun and the blood.
    Another was a diver. A sea woman in her forties. She survived it. Once, she showed Ahrim the scar that ran up along the side of her body, curved, like an albino root, where the shark had gnawed. “A pound of flesh,” she joked with the tourists.
    All sea women seek death , was a common expression heard among the island. It was a state of being almost there and returning from that place.
    Her mother used to speak of the divers from fifteen hundred years ago. In those days there were thousands, the women providing food for their families. They swam without fins, their eyes naked against the cold water, and each time they dove, a bit of the ocean entered them through their open eyes and they took it back to their homes. For what? Ahrim asked. For their children, her mother answered. They carried
the seawater within them and it surrounded the children that grew in their bellies. And the children were born and they were not afraid and they sought the sea.
    After her parents’ death, after Jinsu, too, was long gone, she would take walks alone to the coast. Hours before dawn she followed a trail through tall grass then climbed the walls of a bluff, and when she arrived at the high meadow she began to run, her eyes focused on the distant sea, stopping just short of the cliff’s edge. She ran back and did it once more. All through the morning she kept running, over and over again across the headland until she collapsed in exhaustion, crying, blinded by the reflections against the far water.
    Where she lay seemed to be the world in its entirety and neither the sea nor the sky existed. It felt as though she were being pulled into the white, and there was the desire, yes, in those days. Though it wasn’t for death, specifically. It was the fall. To jump the cliff, to meet the water with such force that perhaps the world would shudder and flip and when she surfaced she would be where Jinsu was—that ash-eyed boy whom she met in the sea when she was sixteen years old, his fishing hook caught in her hair, reeling her in unawares as she struggled underwater to open her pocketknife. When she surfaced she grabbed his ankle and said, “You have my hair,” and together they looked up at the clumps on his fishing hook, aloft, dark as kelp and dripping.

    Years after the Second World War ceased, she would be notified that his body was discovered in the mountains of a Pacific island. In his chest pocket was an address, the one-room house on the eastern coast of Solla. The body hung within the canopy of a tree. They found him with his shoulders sagging forward and his Japanese uniform brittle, his face long ago erased of identity. It was assumed he had been propelled into the air by an explosion, though what killed him was the pointed arm of a tree that sliced through his forearm and then pierced his heart,