Hitherby Dragons

The first goat crosses the bridge from east to west. It traipses on the wood, tap tap tap.

The troll stands there, looking surly, staring off into the distance.

Mr. Eugene Barrett II stands stiffly on the eastern side. He is dressed in a pinstripe suit. It is neatly pressed. He looks profoundly uncomfortable.

“There will be a second goat, you know,” says the troll.

“Er, yes,” says Eugene. “I suppose there must be.”

“I will roar, and brandish my claws, like so,” says the troll, roaring and brandishing his claws. “And I will say, ‘You must be the second billygoat, larger and tastier than the first. I have prepared a mole sauce for you!’”

Eugene is silent. The troll is silent. Finally, Eugene says, “Those are difficult. I mean, I heard that they were hard to make.”

“Extraordinarily!” roars the troll. He brandishes his claws. “Particularly with these things for hands.”

“I say.”

The troll snorts. He waits. He watches. The second billygoat traipses up. The goat eyes Eugene warily. Then the troll roars and brandishes his claws.

“You must be the second billygoat, larger and tastier than the first! I have prepared a mole sauce for you!”

“I am not a mole,” notes the goat.

The troll blinks three times.

Eugene ventures, “I believe he means the Mexican sauce based on—”

The goat looks dangerously at Eugene, who is suddenly aware that the second goat is much bigger than the first.

“Perhaps you could let me go,” says the goat.

“No!” roars the troll. He brandishes a claw. He counts off on his fingers. “First, I am hungry. Second, I have already prepared the sauce. Third, I am ruthless. Fourth, I am educating this banker! I must set a good example.”

The goat laughs. “Perhaps he should leap on me with his great terrible fingernails and rend me to shreds. It would be active learning!”

“Er,” says Eugene. “I really don’t think—”

The troll makes a gesture to silence him.

“Very well,” says the billygoat. “I suppose I am doomed, then. But … but it occurs to me …”

“Yes?” asks the troll.

“I do have another brother, larger and tastier than myself.”

“You don’t say!”

“I do,” says the goat. “I do indeed. And we might be too much of a meal, you understand, taken together.”

“I might run out of sauce,” ruminates the troll.

“Verily.”

The troll’s nostrils flare. “Then go,” he says. “Go across the bridge.”

“I could go with him,” says Eugene. “To show him the way.”

“No,” says the troll.

“I was really supposed to ride across on the first goat,” says Eugene. “To rescue some sort of princess—”

The troll’s gaze is flat and level. “Is that so?”

The second goat crosses the bridge from east to west. It traipses on the wood, clank clank clank.

Eugene sighs.

They wait.

“Do—” Eugene pauses. He gulps. He speaks again. “Do trolls have treasure hoards? I mean, like dragons?”

“No!” roars the troll. He brandishes his claws. Eugene shrinks in on himself. The troll thinks about it for a moment. “Maybe. Perhaps. I suppose. Some.”

“Some treasure hoards?”

“A few,” says the troll dismissively. “They are small and unworthy of mention.”

Eugene says, “Ah.”

“Why do you ask?” says the troll.

Eugene shifts uncomfortably from foot to foot. “I like money,” he says.

The third goat approaches.

The troll looks thoughtfully at Eugene. He asks, “Why are you even here?”

“The guys,” Eugene says. “You know. The guys. They thought that I should have a marvelous fantasy adventure. You know. To loosen up. To learn—you know. Claw brandishing, goat riding, princess-saving. And such.”

The troll looks Eugene up and down. Then he looks up at the goat.

The goat’s hot breath comes down on the troll’s head.

“I hate trolls,” rumbles the third billygoat.

It looks at Eugene.

“Also,” it adds, “bankers.”

“These people,” the troll says to Eugene. “These ‘guys’.”

“Yes?” Eugene asks.

The troll shakes his head. “They are not your friends.”

Sid fights. His face is twisted up in a look of menace. He screams and struggles with the enemy. But he is tired of war.

The tides of war take him past a bed, in a ruined house.

A hand from under the bed reaches for his ankle.

He is tired of war. He lets it grasp him. He lets it pull him under. He plans to let it eat him, or carry him off, or whatsoever it is that boogeymen do.

But in the darkness he finds that he cannot let himself die.

There, under the bed, he is drawn to struggle once again. His hands form claws. He fights in darkness. It draws him deeper. Then, with one hand, he recovers a flashlight from his pocket and turns it on. He shines it below his face, which is still twisted in a horrible look of menace.

There is a scriddling and a scrabbling and the boogeyman is gone.

Sid sags. His arms are bleeding. One leg is half-shredded. He will not make his way back to the battle tonight.

He shines the flashlight around the space.

“It is more cavernous,” he says, “than I would have expected, under a bed.”

“Yes,” answers a voice. It is not the boogeyman’s voice. It is strangely human. He turns the flashlight towards the voice, and the light comes to rest on the face of an enemy soldier. The soldier wears a uniform. Her hair is close-cropped over a round face. Her eyes are squinty and her mouth is twisted into a horrible scowl. It is like the horrible faces that a child makes to scare her peers. Sid drifts the light away.

“Sid,” he says.

“Emily.”

He blinks. He processes her image again in his mind. “A woman?”

“Yes.”

“You’re no camp follower,” he says.

“It’s normal for a woman to stay out of the fighting,” she admits. “And just provide the cooties necessary to poison the armament.”

“It’s an effective contribution,” Sid says. “I lost a lot of my squad to cooties.”

“But I wanted to fight.”

“Girls shouldn’t—” Sid starts. Then he shrugs. “I guess once your face is stuck like that, there’s nothing to be done.”

“Yeah,” she says.

“Ever regret it?”

“No,” she says. “You?”

“It was an accident,” he admits. “I was just playing around. Making faces. And then one stuck. It wasn’t because I wanted to fight. It was just . . . something that happens to kids, sometimes.”

“Were you disappointed?”

“I was going to be a banker,” Sid says. “But it’s honest work, you know. To go out and scare the enemy with your twisted face, to protect your country. To have your face stuck in a horrible position, it makes you someone important. Someone who can fight. It’s good. It’s important. It’s necessary.”

“It is.”

There’s a bit of a silence.

“I cried for weeks,” Sid says. “And then more, every few months, every year as I grew up. It was just a stupid kid thing. ‘Let’s see what I look like with my cheeks puffed out and my eyes rolled back. I bet it’d be really scary!’”

“Scared the boogeyman good,” she says.

“And then I was stuck this way for the rest of my life.”

Sid looks down the boogeyman’s tunnel.

“Will it come back?”

“Dunno,” she says. “It tore me up pretty good, but then it must’ve sensed the cooties, ’cause it just left me here. Like it’s waiting for something. I guess maybe the cooties stop when you die.”

“Not in India,” Sid says. “There you actually get special dead flesh cooties.”

“Huh,” she says.

There’s another silence.

“That face isn’t such a bad look,” he says, “on you.”

There’s a soldier’s pride in her answer, then, sharp and angry. “Put your light back on my face and say that,” she dares him.

“I mean, you’re pretty.”

“Oh.”

She laughs. Her laughter comes in short gasps and then falls silent.

“Oh,” he agrees.

“If we could stand up,” she says, “and leave this place, I’d have to kill you. With my horrible face. You know.”

“I know,” says Sid. “But we can’t.”

He can sense her trying to smile.

“So I guess your face isn’t so bad, either,” she says.

“Thanks.”

“We could make wishes,” she says. “Maybe if we wish hard enough we won’t be here any more. I’ve been trying, and not much luck, but two wishers are better than one.”

There’s a silence.

“I can’t wish that,” says Sid. “I don’t want to go back.”

There is a soft sigh.

“I understand,” the enemy soldier says.

Sid emerges from the hotel room. He stretches. He smiles.

That’s when Jane walks up. She hands him an envelope.

“What’s this?” he asks.

He is reflexively opening it. Inside there is a check.

“It’s your interest.”

Jane attempts to peek through the door behind Sid. Sid stands in her way.

“My interest?”

“Bankers do it with interest,” Jane says. “Everyone knows that. But nobody knows who’s responsible for making sure it happens! So I took it on myself.”

“I see,” Sid says.

“You’re blushing!”

Sid blushes more brightly. Jane attempts to see through the door again. Sid closes the door.

“I also thought I’d get a chance to figure out what ‘it’ is,” Jane admits. “I mean, this way.”

“Nobody knows,” Sid says, quite seriously. “It probably has something to do with the Mayan calendar expiring in 2012.”

“Ah! It’s one of those mystery conspiracy things.”

Jane looks smug.

“Thought so,” Jane says.

“Now,” says Sid, trying to act casual, “if you’ll excuse me, I should go, er, check on the status of, er, Neptune.”

“Oh!” says Jane. She looks embarrassed. “I’d almost forgotten about Neptune. I haven’t done anything about it in forever. I’ll come with you.”

“This is a special Neptune,” Sid says. “It’s personal.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Thanks for understanding,” Sid says. He examines the interest check one more time. “Er, is this all?”

“Bankers compound it annually!”

“Thank you,” Sid says. He edges open the door, ducks inside, and is gone.

“Yay!” Jane checks a name off her list. “Now to make sure that that librarian is doing it by the book!”

That’s right, world! Jane is on the case!

Most banks are money banks. You go to the bank and withdraw money. Some banks are different. Blood banks, for example. They give you blood instead. You might wake up and say, “My coworkers think I’m too drab. I should get some blood splattered all over this outfit.” So you go to the blood bank on the way to work. You put your card in the ATM. You type some numbers. Then the slot in the ATM opens up. Blood sprays out. There’s a pause. More blood sprays out. There’s a pause. More blood sprays out. There’s a pause. Then some last blood dribbles on your shoes. That’s how arterial teller machines work. Afterwards, you take out your bank card and your receipt and you go to work. You will be the talk of the water cooler, and you might even get a special interview from someone in human resources! There are also milk banks. Milk banks are a great way to get milk when you don’t have any on you and there’s an emergency where you really need milk. That’s why they have them. Flower banks provide flowers. It’s okay to withdraw flowers from a flower bank if you have the right card. Sometimes the gardeners will shout when you take them but that’s all part of the flower bank service. The bank gives you flowers and gardener shouting and sometimes running exercise for you. That’s a flower bank. Finally, there are military banks.

Military banks are a recent innovation. You go to the bank and withdraw soldiers and military equipment. It is true that the soldiers and equipment are dressed in the uniform of the country where you withdraw them. It doesn’t really matter, though. With a military bank, soldiers and military technology are functionally just bits and numbers in the giant international military economy. It does not matter who they work for. You could almost call them mercenary except that that is a mean word to use about people you just withdrew from the bank.

Military banking is much superior to standing armies because it brings the innovations of finance to the military world. People who use military banks laugh at traditional armies. They say, “A standing army is like keeping your money in a jar under the bed!” It’s silly to have an army at home when you can invest your army in the international banking system and have all the banking conveniences. For example, if you have a military savings account, you can earn extra recruits through compound interest. The United States has very many soldiers, but even one soldier compounded annually for two hundred years could beat them all up. That’s a savings account. You could also have a checking account. If you have a military checking account, then you don’t need to bring your army to every war. You can sometimes just show up and write a check for your forces and the enemy looks at the check and gets very intimidated.

“Is this valid?” asks the enemy. “I mean, are you really good for 200,000 soldiers and a shock and awe invasion?”

“Yes,” you say, bluffly. You put your hands on your hips and bestride the world.

“I need to see some ID,” the enemy says. Sometimes there are many enemies and you will need to show your ID to all of them. In this scenario there is just one.

So you present your ID.

“Well,” says your enemy. “I guess we’re all dead. Unless we can fight you on some sort of installment plan.”

And that’s that!

If you have a checking account or a savings account, you can also usually withdraw soldiers at any time when you need them. They just shoot out of the slot on the ATM. It would probably be less ambiguous to say that they chute out from the slot because the other description might imply that they crouch in the machine firing at the street, and that is not a good way to have return customers.

There are other possibilities that have recently opened up because of military banking. For example, if you don’t care about force as a solution to problems, you can start buying interest in an army and then selling soldiers short. You can also buy soldiers on the margin if you think that there will be a war soon. You can profit on the exchange rates between soldiers of different countries, if you’re a sharp investor, because they are based on faith and credit and fear and not just quality and training.

Right now military banking is limited because many banks have forgotten that being nice to their customers is useful. It is bad and snotty enough when banks start giving you trouble for financial transactions but when each teller and each bank executive has a drawer filled with one hundred highly-trained killing machines they are less likely to extend courtesy.

In addition, the military is notoriously conservative, so they resist the update to modern military banking.

“If we switch to military banking,” declares General M, “then troops won’t be loyal to the country any more. How could they be? At any moment, they could be electronically transferred anywhere in the world, converted for a slight fee into the soldier of some other nation, and then used to fight for whoever has a good ATM card.”

This is not actually what would happen, because people and bits are not fungible in this manner, but he has a point. However, Generals like General M (and also Generals P-Z) care too much about loyal soldiers. Some psychologists think that even if soldiers had no loyalties they would still run around killing the enemy because when you’re at war it just seems like the thing to do. Others think that if soldiers had no loyalties they’d just chat and decide who’d win, much like people do in Internet debates, because that’s even easier than actually fighting and they don’t have to get out of their chairs. Either way, the countries who hire them get more or less the results they’d expect for the equivalent investment of force.

This is not to say that there are no problems with the military banking system. They are just modern problems. For example, one of the ATMs could break and start spitting out soldiers all over the street. Then people could run around drafting them and shouting, “I’m forceful! I’m forceful! I’m a new military power!” and become a street filled with competing warlords like in Somalia. That is one possible problem. There are other possible problems too. For example, banking executives are not entirely reliable. If a bank collapses due to military embezzlement, perhaps because someone constructed a junta to take over a small South American country and then defaulted on returning the soldiers, as bank executives are wont to do, then the government probably has to bail the system out. Since extra soldiers might not be available, the people would have to pay the price tag. The government would collect extra security guards and watchdogs and unlikely heroes from the private sector. It would look like this.

Joe Block, an unlikely hero, a man who has some military experience in his past but now mostly wants to sit around smoking salmon and shouting at kids from his porch, sits on his porch with his dog. Suddenly, government agents arrive. “I’m afraid,” say the government agents, “that we’re going to have to assess you a value of 72 soldiers, because that’s about how many you could kill in a typical gritty action movie before you finally kissed the girl.”

“Ruff!” barks the dog.

Joe just looks interested, ’cause this is the first time he’s heard about the girl.

“The dog is only worth 3 soldiers,” the agents assess, “two of whom would die due to a slapstick accident that leaves them helpless as it advances.”

“Ruff,” says the dog, disappointed. It is considered only 1/24 as deadly as the man it protects. That’s like trying to protect a whole day and hearing that you’re really only up for 2am—it’s very disappointing.

“So we’re going to take you to the vault,” the government agents say, “and use you to bail out Mr. Simons, who risked the stability of the military economy by engaging in fraudulent usury.”

“Not simony?” Joe asks, just to check, because the man’s name is Mr. Simons.

“No, sir. Usury.”

“Okay,” says Joe. He sets his jaw. It looks like a block. “Let’s go.”

So they would haul him away and haul the dog away and use them to bail out the system. Which sounds okay, but what if there’s a gritty action movie later and Joe Block just isn’t there? The explosions, deaths, and dialogue in the movie would be extremely inexplicable and possibly even surreal due to the absence of the protagonist.

“Oh my God,” an extra will say. “He’s still alive.”

There will be a shot.

The extra will fall down.

The camera will swivel to look at the gunman. But there’ll be nobody there. There’ll just be a wall and a sink and a print of a painting by Monet of some water lilies, and they will be, no matter how good the camera man is, somewhat fuzzy.

Also the scenes with the absent dog will make no sense.

Sometime you should try watching Die Hard and imagining that Bruce Willis and his immediate actions, but not their consequences, have been digitally edited out. It is a very different movie, in many respects.

Cigarettes

Sid has a daughter. Her name is Emily.

“Emily!” Sid says. “You should smoke. Smoking rules.”

Sid takes out a cigarette. He lights it. He puffs it. He turns a little green. He coughs. He says, “Gosh DARN it!”

Emily looks at Sid uncomfortably.

“No, really,” says Sid. “It’s great.”

Sid takes another puff. “Oh, HECK,” says Sid.

Emily backs away.

Hypocrisy

Sid and Emily walk in the park.

“I just don’t understand why all these people are being immoral,” Sid says. “With their sex and all.”

“But don’t you have sex with that woman, daddy?”

“Oh, it’s all right for people like us to be hypocritical,” Sid says.

Sid’s knee locks. He falls down. He writhes on the ground. “FUDGE! Muffin fudge up a badgered guppy side order.”

After a bit, Sid stands up.

He looks around shiftily.

“That hypocrisy didn’t hurt at all,” he tells Emily.

Peer Pressure

Martha sidles up to Sid with Emily watching.

Martha holds out a white packet.

“Sid,” says Martha, “you should buy some of my drugs.”

“I should?” Sid says.

“I have to keep my quota,” Martha says. “Otherwise I will be mortified before the other Cartel Ladies at the Cartel Lady Social.”

Sid frowns. “Martha, do you ever wonder if combining drug culture and Avon distribution techniques was a bad move for America?”

“I’m happy as a Cartel Lady!” chirps Martha.

There’s a pause.

Lowering her voice, Martha adds, “All the other ladies’ boyfriends are taking drugs.”

Sid’s resistance crumples.

“I have to be just like all the other boyfriends!” he says. “I’ll take it!”

Then he winces and folds practically in half. “Ow! Ow! Ow! Shuffle-civic guppy-badgering three-eyed son of a hobo! Fudge! Fudge me upside-down cake with a trowel!”

Martha colors.

Sid straightens. Holding himself very stiff and still, he walks away.

“It’s not very good to succumb to peer pressure, is it, Martha?” Emily asks.

Martha looks about shiftily. “Of course it is, Emily. Of course it is.”

Scientific Procedure

Martha leaves the packet on the table and goes on an errand.

Emily looks at it. She thinks about it. After a while, she tastes the white powder inside.

Emily is flying very high when Martha returns.

“Hi, Martha!” Emily says. She giggles. “I can see God. He’s all brown and rectangular.”

“Oh, Emily,” says Martha. “Did you take that heroin I left here for Sid?”

“Yes,” says Emily. Then she looks nervous. “Am I in trouble?”

Martha looks at the packet. She tastes its contents.

“Nope!” she says. “This was the placebo.”

“Huh?” Emily says.

“Sugar,” Martha says. “It’s all part of a giant double-blind placebo test that the Cartel Ladies are conducting! Neither the dealer nor the druggie knows whether it’s real drugs or not.”

“No wonder it didn’t hurt you to sell drugs,” Emily says. “They were actually an FDA-approved substance!”

This is the story of a man. His name’s Steve.

He hangs out with the sharks. Or at least, he did.

Steve never liked being good too well. He didn’t have an evil nature, exactly. He wanted to do well by his fellow man. He needed goodness to be whole, just like you and me. But he never liked it.

Steve wanted to be a shark.

“So,” Steve says one day, staring up at the Heavens, “here’s a thing between you and me. I’m bound to be good, and if I’m not, that’s a sin. I’ll suffer for it here and I’ll suffer for it there. And I have to ask, what about the sharks? What contract do you have with the sharks and the wasps and the terrors of the deep that lets them hurt others so?”

And there is a thundering in the firmament and a light in the shadow, and he hears this voice: “What business is it of yours, my covenant with the sharks?”

And that is all the answer he gets that day.

Steve’s sitting in the bar. He’s talking to Ben. He’s saying, “It’s cruel, is what it is. They don’t have to be good. They don’t worry if they’re good enough. They just swim, smooth and sleek, and their teeth are like knives.”

Ben rapidly establishes context. “The sharks?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s better to be human,” Ben says. “But it’s not better to worry. That’s where you’re getting mixed up—the two aren’t the same thing. Guilt isn’t goodness.”

“If it’s not the same,” says Steve, “it might as well be.”

And Steve walks down the street, and he can feel the water on his skin, and the cold dark deeps of his eyes. And he works at the bank, and he knows he could steal enough to live well forever. And he passes a girl and he wants her. And he has a little stomachache from eating too much and he knows that all over the world are people who don’t have enough.

And he says, “How do the sharks get away with it?”

The firmament shakes and the girl runs for a building and the cars on the street speed up and one of them grinds its tire on the curb and an old homeless guy on the corner falls down and a businessman’s coffee sloshes right out of his cup as the voice says, to Steve, “What is my covenant with the sharks to you?”

“I want to rip them up,” says Steve, “with my fine sharp teeth.”

And the voice is low, and soft, and this time it is just within Steve’s soul. It says, “You do not.”

So Steve kicks over a trash can, because he can, and then he feels dumb, and he picks up the trash and puts it back in and he goes home and he washes his hands and he goes to bed.

Ben calls him the next day, from the office where they work.

“Hey, Steve,” says Ben. “You didn’t show up today. Are you okay?”

“I wouldn’t be happy as a shark,” Steve says.

He hasn’t shaved. He hasn’t even really gotten out of bed.

“That’s true,” says Ben.

“Why wouldn’t I be happy as a shark?”

“You like the idea of sharks, man. Not the reality. You don’t want to tear people up and look at the blood and the horror of their pain. You want to tear up props that look like people. You don’t want to steal. You want to be a glamorous outlaw. You want the world to give you exactly what you want without any prices, ’cause you know that the price of badness isn’t one you’re willing to pay.”

“It’s not?”

“Look at yourself, Steve,” says Ben, who has a pretty good idea what Steve looks like right now. “You’d be empty and hollow like a rat. You’d be cold and alone and your eyes’d be filled with shock. You’d be broken, man. Hurting people just isn’t as cool in the real world as it is in the cinema of your brain.”

“I could stop caring,” says Steve.

“It’s the covenant of humans and the world,” says Ben. “That it’s better to care. That it’s wholer. That when you love others it can fill you with joy.”

Steve frowns.

“How come you know so much, Ben?”

“You know how sometimes people’ll be walking along thinking about stuff and the firmament shakes and the television goes staticky and a voice answers their thoughts?”

“Well, yah,” says Steve. Everybody knows about that.

“I listen in,” summarizes Ben.

Steve looks appalled. “That’s theological voyeurism, man.”

“I’m addicted to truth. But hey, it pays off, ’cause when you ask me these questions, I can tell you what’s what.”

“But . . .”

Steve flails.

“But,” says Steve, “does that mean that the sharks are hollow and empty and cursed by God?”

The line goes dead. The blender whirls three times. The light flickers and the music of the spheres is for a moment piercing and loud:

“What is it to you, Steven, my covenant with the sharks?”

“You’ve got to be fair, man,” Steven tells the universe. “You’ve given them some kind of preferential deal, haven’t you? You’ve done something . . . they get to be happy monsters.”

The light in the room is blinding and the messenger is there.

“Steven,” says the messenger. His hair is long and silver. His robes are white. His eyes are shadowed. “Steven, the world was born in a state of undifferentiated sin. It is full of error. It is a place of ignorance, fear, and desire. And it is the covenant of the world with humanity that humans may cleanse that sin. That they may be recipients of grace. It is that opportunity given to you, that you may be good. It is priceless because in virtue and in love and in trying to be good you heal the world.”

And Steven thinks about what it’s like to have hard cartilege fins and rough gray skin.

“Please,” Steven says. “Please tell me about the sharks.”

“They are evil,” says the messenger. “They are gatherers of evil. They are a sinkhole for the horror of the world. For if there were not sharks, if there were not wasps, if there were not sociopaths and monsters, then that evil would roam free, in the dust, in the water, in the air, and it could not be healed with ending.”

“Gatherers,” Steven says.

“Sin is a wound,” the messenger says. “The evil are those who take that wound into their souls and let it unweave them until they are hollow worthless men.”

“That’s the one I want,” Steven says. “That’s the covenant I want.”

The messenger bows.

It’s best not to think of it in a human’s terms, because you can’t. If you could understand the covenant of the sharks, you’d be a shark.

Steve walks out of the room. He breathes the air. He looks around. Then he goes, and he begins to kill.

There’s a sinkhole in his heart where you and I’ve got a source. There’s a black depth in his eyes where you and I have light. And he isn’t sad that he kills, and it doesn’t hurt him to hurt, and he doesn’t even have to lie.

It’s not something we could understand. It’s not a human covenant, and it’s not a human thing.

It’s just what he does, so that when he dies, when they fill him full of bullets on an overpass at night, and he falls, and there’s blood in his mouth and his skin’s scraped raw, it’s not a murder that destroys a man but the justice given to a shark.

He laughs as he dies.

He’s not around any more.

Ben asks the world, a while later, “Why was that right? Why was it okay that he did that? What kind of world would turn a good man bad?”

And the firmament shakes, and there are terrible winds, and the sky flickers with light, and the voice says, “It is not an affair for the human kind, my covenant with the sharks.”

See also Shriekback’s “Shark Walk.”