The Sharks
By: Nicholas Drabant
The city of Marianna was a small, sleepy city. The people had their homes, their lives, their jobs, and
their families. The Sharks were no different. Unlike their namesake, they were not fierce. They didn’t
have gills or fins or sickle-like teeth. They rarely ate more than anyone else, and even when they did
they only tended to eat as much as the average person would overindulge in. Despite this, the Sharks
had a fearsome reputation as cruel and cold-blooded, all simply because of their namesake.
Now, it was true that Mr. and Mrs. Shark were strong and strict, but never cruel. All they ever asked
was that their two children behaved and acted well around strangers and acquaintances alike, nothing more than what an average parent would ask of their children.
Even though the town knew better though, they still acted leery around the sharks.
“What’s with the name? Are they really that cold blooded? What poor children.” Gossipers would
whisper under their breath at every fleeting glance.
“Hey sharp tooth, out of the water yet?!” Other children, picking up the habit of their parents, would
yell at the children of the family.
“Things will get better,” Their relatives and few friends would constantly repeat in every message to
the family, “Things will get better.”
They never did truly get better, only slightly more of the same. The insults would come, only instead
of from playful, unknowing children, they would come from well mannered, well known adults. The
insults sporadically got worse, like waves in an ocean or an uncontrolled economy, they spiraled and
spiraled.
What once seemed like harmless gossip and childlike insults became fish left dead at the family’s
doorstep or people parading around with fins on their back and spear guns at their hip or even the
children returning home to claim that “shark boy had bitten them” with imprints of their own teeth on
their arms.
For a time this ideal of making fun of the family allowed for the economy to boom. People bought the
fish to place on the family’s doorstep enough to fund the fishermen of the town. The spear guns allowed for an increase in the sales of spear fishing tours. And the “bites,” all of which were claimed to
be false or self-inflicted by the local dentist, brought kids into local doctors offices like flies to honey.
However, all this was at the expense of one family, who continued to evade people, and express both
sorrow and anger on how what they had hoped would be a new start in a new town had turned into
a torment not even the devil would be evil enough to conjure. Even the government, who had once
been on the side of the ailing family, but who were now spurred on the economic progress this case
had brought them, had begun to turn on them.
“There’s obviously something wrong with them, they’re sharks for crying out loud!” The mayor once
said in a crowd, smiling a filthy, slimy smile, the grossness of only matched by his sleazy mustache.
Eventually, the family, scarred by the events that took place in the town, and scared of what may
occur in the future, left. For the first time in years the city of Marianna was truly free of Sharks. The
only remnant of them ever living there was their house, surrounded by the buried bones of hundreds,