THE SHARK IN HER BELLY

The Shark in Her Belly
by Patrick Barb

When Mom returned from her girls’ weekend at the beach, she had a shark growing in her belly. I didn’t know this at first. After all, her skin hadn’t stretched. Her belly hadn’t ballooned, her womb filling with the viscous saltwater-tainted amniotic fluid through which the shark swam and fed. The first real outward sign of change came when Mom swore off drinking.

Then, she stopped letting Dad touch her. Both changes happened back to back, shortly after she’d settled in post-vacation.

“My sunburn, babe!” she’d say, eyes rolling back white in her sockets as though some electric shock pumped through her. She wasn’t in pain though. Her mouth hung slack, eyelashes fluttering like hummingbird wings in flight. The sight reminded me of the people getting healed on the gaudy faith-healer shows I’d watch on Sunday mornings at Grandma’s.

Never mind that Mom’s skin after vacation didn’t look anything like the cooked lobster red of a sunburn but more of a clam’s shell white-to-silver color. When Dad tried to touch her, when he’d caress Mom’s silvery, glimmering skin with the tips of his fingers, they’d come back moist, dripping water droplets onto the carpet or the sofa or our dining room table. Mom’s skin showed the impression of his fingertips from even the slightest touch, displaying swirling rainbows in the hoops and whorls of Dad’s fingerprints.

When Dad got frustrated and stormed off to the garage or the bathroom or to go for a drive, Mom took the opportunity to pull me close, pressing me against her. I tried to get away. “Mommmm, get offa me!” In those moments, it felt like those four words were all I ever said to her.

But she wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t take no for an answer. She was relentless. I was a “big boy” by then, but not big-big. I came up to Mom’s belly. She’d lift her shirt and push my ear against the tightening skin. She pushed me so hard that her outie belly button tickled the inside of my ear.

Once the tickling started, laughter followed. Like I’d heard the funniest joke in the world and couldn’t restrain my mirth. I’d stop when I heard the ocean inside her.

No lie, I heard waves crashing inside my mother. Breaking against her. No, not just waves, not just the rhythmic rise and fall of water controlled by tides and the moon circling above us. A thrashing, splashing sound came next. Something alive moved inside my mother.

When I’d manage to pull myself free, Mom held a finger to her lips. Shushing me. She winked like we’d shared some secret meant only for her, me, and whatever swam inside her.

After the first time Mom held me, I went online and looked up sharks, trying to read everything the SafeSearch on our browser allowed. I started with sharks because I’d heard so much about them in the news while Mom was away with her “girls.”

They were all anybody, local news and otherwise talked about, that year. Unless it was war or presidents or diseases, sharks always swam into the spotlight. Dad and I should’ve found it strange, the way Mom never mentioned sharks when we called her to check in—every night before my bedtime. I pressed my ear against the back of the phone, while Dad held the receiver to the side of his head. I’d listen for the other ladies in the background: Aunt Rachel, Ms. Teena, Laurie Bethel, Mrs. Velvourt, “Cousin” Gary the Eccentric, but I’d only hear water and nothing else. It sounded like Mom took all her calls in the ocean, so even the early morning debriefs sounded as though she’d rolled out of a bed on the breakers, answering our calls with a curt, sharp-tongued “What?”

The water lapping inside Mom’s belly reminded me of the sounds picked up on those vacation calls. As though an unsettled presence lingered beside her in the ocean back then and within her body in the present.

In my search for understanding, I learned sharks don’t bear their young like humans carry unborn children. Sharks lay eggs. Mom couldn’t have a shark in her belly. And yet, every fiber of my being from my big toes to my brain screamed at me, loud and insistent, ensuring me yes, indeed, there was a shark in Mom’s belly.

When bedtime arrived, I turned off the computer and brushed my teeth. The smashed white bristles rubbed against my rounded teeth, nothing too sharp to be found in my jaw.  When I finished and went to say goodnight, I found Dad stretched across the living room couch with a wool blanket Grandma’d made for us draped over him. I stood on tip-toes to kiss his bristled cheek and he pulled me close, kissing the top of my head.

He smelled like tobacco, but only on his hands, not in his mouth. “Your mom’s taking a bath,” he told me.

Sometimes grown-ups say things, but they’re one-half of a full thought. It’s like these brain teasers they share, but they don’t tell you where to find the answers in the back of the book. Then, you’ve got to puzzle out what the problem is and the solution as well. And forget about asking any follow-up questions! Most times, they’ll pretend they don’t even know what you’re talking about.

Still, what he said sounded straightforward. When I went by Mom and Dad’s bathroom, the lights were on. The door was open a crack, a slit cut through the world I knew and understood (most days), to show me something else behind it. Something beyond personal, beyond private, beyond the grown-up stuff I’d “understand someday when I was older.”

I watched Mom stretched out in the tub. Except I missed seeing the clear surface of the water surrounding her or the slight sheen of soap, dirt, and sweat from her day washed off to circle her naked body. This water appeared red like someone squeezed paint from the tubes in my art cart to coat the basin of the claw-foot tub. With the water gushing from the spigot, I imagined the red floating to the surface in twisting clouds of crimson. Red. Red like a fire engine, red like flashing lights, red like a warning.

Red like blood.

I stood in place while Mom bathed, rubbing her hands up and down her arms, coating her bare skin in the red liquid. She whispered a song or sang in a whisper. Hands moved from her neck to her breasts, then under the blood-red water. She hitched her legs on the sides of the tub. The water sloshed and splashed. Mom slid down, her mouth filling with water, filling with red.

I leaned forward and the floorboard squeaked under my foot. Mom’s eyes rolled back. But this time they weren’t white. This time, they were black. I ran to my bed and pulled the sheets over my head. Pressed them tight against me. As though I’d cocoon myself in blankets and create an impenetrable force field no one could break or bite through.

With the fuzzy cloth pressed against my ears, blood rushed through my head. This repeating throbbing sound came next, so persistent I worried I’d got something stuck inside me, in my skull. My breathing quickened as I imagined a shark swimming inside, under the bone. Feasting on the pink and gray parts of my brain. The vision overwhelmed my senses

Until all became black.

And then, it was morning.

Dad woke me up late.

He never woke me up before. Usually, Mom got me through my morning routine. She’d come in singing a silly song about waking up and taking on the day, rhyming words at random. Nonsense stuff. She switched the words around every time and it always made me laugh and laugh. Dad always remained somewhere else in the house, getting ready for work.

But this time, it was Dad with his red tie hanging to his stomach with the end reaching below his belt, looming over my bed like he’d gotten lost and stumbled upon me. Shaving cream remnants decorated his cheeks. “Wake up. We’re late!”

No song for me. Nothing to compel me to rise.

But I did all the same.

I got my underwear, socks, and pants on, but still wore my too-small, too-tight pajama shirt, when I stood in the doorway to my room, looking out into the hallway and rubbing sleep from my eyes.

“Where’s Mom?” I asked.

Dad gave no answer. He walked by with my raincoat—even though it wasn’t raining that morning and wasn’t forecasted for later in the day either. He dropped the coat on me, so it hung loosely from my head. Then, he scooped me up with one hand and held my backpack in his other fist.

His lips were squeezed shut. So tight, the color left them. A low hum escaped, but it wasn’t meant for me. More like he needed to keep a constant sound going long enough to block out something else. Whether it was something he’d taken from the outside world or something trying to escape from inside him, I didn’t know. And still don’t know.

On the way out the door, without my usual Pop-Tart breakfast from Mom, we passed their bathroom. Its door was closed. Tight this time. Still, I picked up on the water running behind the door. Steam emerged from underneath, curling wisps of white smoky tendrils grabbing for us. Many-limbed, like some squid or octopi.

“Mom?”

Dad kept us moving forward. Didn’t stop until he clicked me into my booster seat in the back of the car and we were on our way to school.

I kept my raincoat on all day because my pajama shirt was too small and had cartoon puppies on it. Fine enough for sleeping in, but not something I wanted the other kids to see.

Dad was late to pick me up at the end of the day too.

Mom remained in the bath when we got home. Stayed in there through dinner and bedtime too.

+++

This pattern repeated for the rest of the school week. I don’t know when, or if,  Mom left the bathroom. If she did, it happened when I was in school and Dad was away at work.

Dad didn’t take this change too well. At the beginning of the week, he tried showering at the gym, but it soon fell by the wayside. His hair turned curly with sprigs of twirled black like someone other than himself ran their fingers through it, teasing it out. Given the shimmer on the top of his head, I imagined this imaginary other’s fingers coming away slick with grease and sweat when they finished.

“Do you wanna use my tub, Dad?” I asked during dinner, both of us shoveling grilled cheese sandwiches—with burnt tops—into our mouths, cold tomato soup dripping off the blackened crumbs.

“Nuh,” he said. Distracted. Like a much more important debate raged inside his head. I wondered if he noticed any waves or thrashing as I had. Or like what I’d heard inside of Mom.

Mom.

I stopped mentioning her to Dad after the first couple of days. The last time, he’d laughed in my face. No pleasant, “we’re sharing a joke” laugh either. Something mean and spiteful in its intonation. I ran from the living room, my bare feet against the carpeted hallway. The floor outside my parents’ bathroom was damp to the touch. Not wet, not soaked, or anything so extreme. But damp enough so I noticed when a sudden jolt traveled up from the soles of my feet. I stopped in front of the bathroom door.

It hung open a crack. Like the first time. This time I squeezed my eyes closed. Refusing to look. I held my hand over my ears too, trying hard not to hear. I didn’t want to find Mom with her skin whiter, paler, all wrinkled from head to toe. I didn’t want to hear her humming, moaning, kicking red, decrepit water onto the tile floor.

Thrashing. Like something held her down. Pulling on her, pulling her under waves of her own making.

I backed away, one step, then another. Until I was able to turn from the door and run to my room. It marked the last time we said anything about her.

Until one particular dinner. Then, Dad stood from the table, and held his right hand out palm first, giving me a command. Stay. “I’m gonna check if your mother wants to join us.”

Of course, I’d finished my soup and sandwich and stored Dad’s in Tupperware containers in the fridge, long before any sign of Dad’s—or Mom’s—presence reached me. When I passed him in the hallway on the way back to my bed, I caught Dad leaning against their bathroom door, his forehead close to the jamb.

“C’mon, babe. Please come out. C’mon, please. Let’s talk about this. Let’s talk about what happened. What’s happening…”

I got set to sneak past him. I’d put on my PJs and practice reading from the chapter book I checked out from the school library. But then the bathroom door opened.

Mom stood there, not wrinkled or pale as I’d expected. Her skin still retained the silver sheen, but it’d gone so smooth I saw the blood vessels underneath it. They glowed red, full of life. Her hair appeared in blinding white flashes, longer and wind-swept like some romance novel heroine, painted with lavish brush strokes. She’d tied an emerald silken bathrobe around her. But it was far too small to contain everything she’d become. Her full breasts and fuller belly strained against the confines of silk. She wriggled her swollen toes on the hallway carpet.

Her eyes were solid black like she’d stepped wet and ravenous from a nightmare. Eyes black like one of those deep-sea trenches where no light reaches and strange creatures thrive in the shadows. These fully-dilated pupils swept over me, and Mom’s nose wrinkled. She grinned with lips closed and every single tooth pressing against the skin. Then, she turned away from me—her son, moving as though she’d judged me and found me unworthy of attention.

Later, I’d wonder if she detected meatier prey.

Blood in the water.

Dad reached for her, his arms outstretched like some lumbering beast. He encircled her in an embrace. Pulled her against his five o’clock shadow, undershirt, and sweatpants. She radiated against the dullness of him, a black-light gleam against mundanity.

He patted her back. His whisper near her ear came as a choked cry. “I forgive you,” he said.

His hand wandered over his love, seeking the part in her gown and access to her swollen belly, sloshing with seawater weight as she shifted her feet.

The house grew heavy with the scent of saltwater, warm sands, and fish guts. I pulled the neck of my t-shirt around my mouth and nose, trying to block out the more noxious elements. But the scent reminded me of drowning in a swirling cloud of beach rot.

Mom took Dad’s hand. “Hey…”

She cut him off before he finished. Pulled the hand up from its brief contact with whatever swam inside her belly, whatever pressed its angular face against the taut skin of her stomach. A pointed nose and sharp rows of teeth showed through her belly the way her teeth were revealed behind her closed lips.

The bile torrented up through my insides, a rushing swirl of sick. I couldn’t watch anymore, so I ran on nervous tip-toes covering the brief distance to my room, my bathroom. I turned back once and found Mom still holding Dad’s hand tight. She brought it to her lips. The thin pale strands of flesh parted.

I couldn’t tell from where I stood, but it looked as though her teeth grew sharper and were stained red as well.

Mom must’ve sensed my eyes on her. She turned, head snapping toward me so fast her eyes on me stung like a sunburn. “What’s the matter, dear?” she asked, her voice sounding as though she spoke from underwater. “You look green in the gills.”

I avoided watching what happened next. I fled into my bathroom, vomiting up tomato soup. Red and chunky. Like afterbirth. My child of sickness to be flushed away and forgotten. After I finished, I wiped the back of my hand across my lips, mashing flecks of red into the skin.

I couldn’t make myself turn on the water in the sink, couldn’t wash my hands and face, or scrub away the remnants from my lips, teeth, and tongue. The idea of water, even the cool, clear water from the tap, touching my body, repulsed me. Instead, I curled up against the cabinet under my sink and rocked myself back and forth, until I reached some state closer to sleep than not.

+++

After some time, the sound of water rushing through the pipes woke me. The tile was cold and, at first, I mistook the chill for the wetness of water. I assumed it’d found me, despite my best efforts. I sprang to my feet and nearly cracked my skull against the countertop edge. When it didn’t happen, both hands held tight to the marble finish. The spigot sat dry, unused. Nothing from my bathtub either.

Of course, I knew the source of the rushing waters all along. Their siren’s song emanated from the hallway. The lights were on in my parent’s bathroom. I moved toward the center of the house, walking the hallway the way I’d come before, swimming upstream against safety and security. The door to their bathroom gaped open. The cold and hot water taps for the bath were turned to their fullest settings,. For a moment, I watched water hammering water. The heavy spray from the spigot struck the overflowing surface like a whalemen’s spear stabbed into some 19th-century leviathan.

The blood-red waves crested over the rim of the tub, spilling liquid onto the floor and rising past the exterior. I leaned into the bathroom from the dryland of the hallway, uncertain why the waters remained confined to the bathroom and showed no signs of spilling out to me, either to coat my toes or wash me away.

Both options remained within the realm of possibility.

From the hallway, I searched the rising red waters of the bathroom, looking for dark shapes under the surface. My breath emerged in hitched gasps, expectation squeezing my insides. I believed I’d find Mom and Dad both, floating under the crimson wastewaters.

Instead, I encountered nothing more than the gentle slap of water against their bathroom vanity and the clawfoot tub from which it’d originated.

The sound produced a hypnotic effect. It continued with no sign of ceasing, the rhythmic shushing and slapping repeated ad infinitum. If not for Mom’s moans reverberating through the walls, I’d have stayed there forever. When I heard her call from the bedroom, I felt as though she’d reached out to me through the ether, ensnaring me with a new spell.

The way she’d grabbed Dad.

I stumbled away from the bathroom, exhausted. Like I’d swum to the middle of the ocean, stroke after stroke, legs kicking…until I stopped. I’d taken myself somewhere past the crashing waves. I’d entered a place of isolation and calm, where my companion was the eternal dread of knowledge—knowing I shared space with beings who’d called these waters their home, long before man was a dream on the planet. It took years before I put words to the experience. And even now, they’re insufficient.

When you’re young, everything else’s ancient. It’s hard to appreciate time in its rawest form.

Mom and Dad were naked. Nothing I hadn’t seen before, though I’d reached an age where they fled from my eyes, as though the sight would turn me to stone. Where my mother’s body remained shimmering and beautiful in its exaggerated proportions, Dad’s appeared as a droopy, sad, and commonplace thing. In this exposed form, he became a nervous swimmer approaching the ocean in plastic inflatable floaties. The splotchy whiteness of his skin reflected against her vibrant radiance resembled zinc smeared across a sunburnt nose.

She lay on her back, shoulders propped by a mountain of decorative pillows. Her legs parted, her sex revealed. It looked as though a scouring occurred, a savaging of her vagina. From angry red algal bloom like a warning to all who approach pink tendrils slithered out. My father’s cock was a plumped blister in comparison, a veiny crustacean stripped of its protective armor and crowned with steel wool silver hairs. Any notions of eroticism in this tableau fell by the wayside.

Something between fear and ecstasy crossed my father’s face. He stumbled forward on his knees, a lowing like some lost cow separated from the herd accompanying his movements. Soon, he’d reached his partner. In his moment of penetration, I heard his words to her. “I forgive you.”

Her eyes opened black again. Twin abysses in which my father stared and found something staring back at him. Twice over. I watched him try to stop, try to pull back and deny her.

“We don’t need your forgiveness,” she whispered.

Her legs spasmed, shaking. The lips of her sex appeared as coral reef embellishments, ancient living, life-giving structures, straining under the emergence of the creature who’d swum inside her womb since she’d left us for the ocean. The beast grew until there was no more room inside of my mother and its exit was preceded by another wave of blood. It sprayed gouts of chunky red fluid all over Dad. The shark inside Mom’s belly chewed its way down and out of her, thrashing its sleek silver body, scraping fins along her musculature, and gnashing its many rows of needle-sharp teeth.

Then, it found the bait my father dropped from between his legs, ramrod straight and heavy with more blood. Dad stiffened at the sight of sudden death. Frozen until the shark inside Mom’s belly opened its Jack-O’Lantern-grin wide enough to feed. It pushed, swimming out of her, straight ahead, and onto the bed. It grew as more and more of its storm cloud silver form appeared and fins slapped the stained sheets.

Soon, the shark—the new life placed inside Mom by someone, something else—had devoured my father’s manhood. But then, the creature kept going, kept eating, until Dad broke inside this monster’s jaws. Burst like a swollen grape.

And opposite, my mother withered away with a smile on her lips. Like a mermaid’s purse burst open into a desiccated black husk.

Leaving me alone.

+++

But not alone.

The realization hit me as I tip-toed into the bedroom and encountered the shark’s eyes, black like his father’s, staring at me from the soiled sheets and flaccid innards of my parents. Our parents. Well, our mother at least. My half-brother’s mouth opened and closed, unable to articulate, out of his element.

“There you are,” I said. He thrashed among the bloody remnants of my father, following me with his black eyes. The gasping red of his mouth went faster, faster. Leaving me with a decision, another life on the line in my family tree.

Except there was no decision to make, no true conflict. I placed a plastic tub in an old wagon. I filled the tub with water and salted it after. And then I whispered a prayer and pushed my brother off my parent’s bed, into his new home.

I left the house, pulling the wagon behind me. No one except me and my brother—the shark from our mother’s belly. I headed for the ocean. Deciding I’d help him find his father, return him to life under the waves.

A sudden mewling cry, rippling the surface of the water, drew my attention. I looked into the clear water, to where the shark swam. Under the flippers, a tiny arm with a tinier hand and tinier fingers emerged. Reaching for me. He wrapped his extra digits around my thumb and we set off in search of shelter, love, and food.

Fiction © Copyright Patrick Barb
Base Image by Garrett from Pixabay

Patrick Barb is an author of weird, dark, and horrifying tales, currently living (and trying not to freeze to death) in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of Gargantuana’s Ghost (Grey Matter Press), Turn (Alien Buddha Press), and Helicopter Parenting in the Age of Drone Warfare (Spooky House Press). His debut dark fiction collection Pre-Approved for Haunting is forthcoming from Keylight Books / Turner Publishing in October 2023). In addition, he is an Active Member of the HWA and a Full Member of the SFWA. Visit him at patrickbarb.com.