Swim Lesson
by Brennan Thomas
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
I thought as much. The shark slapped the water as though it had guessed the punchline to some dirty joke. There always is with your kind.
The shark glided below him and as it passed, turned under, exposing its white belly and tickling the man’s feet with its thick claspers.
“Ugh! Why did you do that? That felt awful!”
You exposed yourself to me just now, so I must expose myself to you.
“Well, I’d rather you do that by telling me a secret or something instead of thrusting your genitalia at me!”
The shark resurfaced and swam past the man on his left side in a slow, lazy circle, its high dorsal fin cutting through the warm surface.
Tell me another secret. About this woman. It swam away from the man towards the pool’s left side, passing under a small metal platform suspended a few meters above the water. Is she a co-worker? A friend?
“Co-worker. Friend. Both.”
What does she do?
“She’s an L-operator now, but she’s learning. I’m the one training her.” He said this last statement with a tinge of pride as he watched the shark gliding along the pool’s edge, its left fin tip brushing the wall’s caste-skin covering.
“You probably didn’t know that I’m a teacher, too. I’ve helped—”
Why this woman? Is it the convenience of proximity or does she have special assets?
“It’s not that simple. I mean, she’s nice, she works hard. She’s a good learner.”
What does she offer you? The shark banked away from the wall and resumed its languid course around its floating student.
The man was making simple concentric circles with his arms, displacing water with each cupped hand. His legs, though still kicking, were doing so more slowly and evenly. Without conscious thought or his teacher’s help, the man had begun treading water.
“She’s soft, she listens,” he said. “She knows why I never learned to swim.”
Why have you never learned? The shark was no more than a meter from him, its head mere centimeters from the surface. Its eyes focused on the man’s steadying feet. Good.
The man lowered his head, having surmised that his voice was easier for the shark to hear when he spoke close to the water’s surface. “I saw an accident.”
What kind of accident?
“A boy. In my swimming class. Drowned.”
He told the shark everything he’d told Silvi — how the boy had choked on one of the nereid eyes dropped from the pool’s edge by their instructor, how he had thrashed and twisted until he’d sunk below a depth that he and the other swimmers could reach on one breath. The man had been just six years old, but he remembered the boy kicking away from him and the rest of the L-8 class like a frightened octopus seeking refuge in the deep.
Nereid eyes had continued to rain down on the boys as though passing their final and not saving their classmate was of greater importance. The two L-8 instructors stationed at the surface hadn’t seen what happened, but the man took those dropped stones as the clearest sign that no one would rescue him if he followed the choking boy.
The others had all shot to the surface, but he had lingered at twenty meters, tracing the boy’s outline as it disappeared into the blue shadows. Only when a red flash in his right temple signaled that he had just seconds of air left did he ascend.
Silvi had listened to all this with quiet understanding. She had patted his leg, held him, then told him he didn’t have to learn how to swim this year, that she could wait. He had simply shrugged and finished his story.
The doomed boy’s body had been fished out of that WG pool at 92 meters, floating in the bottom’s thick viscous sludge littered with human trash.
The man spoke this final fact to the shark exactly as he had worded it to Silvi: “He’d sunk almost the whole way.”
That happens to children sometimes. The shark shook its head from side to side. Boys especially. They are often thin. They cannot hold air. When they die, they fall like Seidon stones.
“Have you ever seen—”
Adults are different. They often have extra deposits. They float. They are easier to find.
“Do you ever find them?”
One of my many jobs at this facility. The shark’s jaws were not visible to the man from his position, but if he could have seen them, he would have thought the shark was smiling.
“Do you ever teach children?”
No, never. Human children learn best from other humans. Adults are different. They can learn from all sorts of teachers. Humans. Animals. Experience. Pain. They understand consequences that children cannot.
“What do you do with all the adults you try to teach who can’t swim?”
Naturally, as a shark, I eat them.
“You’re joking.”
The shark patted the man’s calf with its pectoral fin. I give them all what your species calls a ‘sporting chance.’
The shark turned its head to the right and swam away from the man’s cycling legs, which had found a sustainable, if somewhat jerky, rhythm.
You are improving, the shark observed.
The man realized what he was doing and looked gratefully at his teacher. “Yeah, I guess I am.”
Try swimming towards the ladder now.
The man, feeling expansive, did as the shark commanded. He lowered his shoulders and tucked his knees beneath his torso, forming an inverted, blocky S as he moved his cupped hands like rotors through the warm water.
He was less than ten meters from the pool’s side when the shark slid entirely below the surface.
Do you feel ready to show this woman what you have learned?
The man watched as the shark swam below, all darkness and writhing muscle. Though it was perhaps only five meters beneath him, the man felt compelled to shout his gratitude.
“Yes! I’m ready!”
A few L-8 swimmers heard the man yelling into the water and laughed as they fumbled with their leg tubes before entering the water from the pool’s shallow end. The man paid them no attention; his eyes tracked the shark’s wobbly blue outline in the darkening depths.
Good. Its voice was softer and yet more solid, as though it had gelled into something that slithered into the man’s ear. I will swim down to the bottom. When I return, you must be out.
“Okay!” he yelled, louder this time. Several more of the L-8 class were laughing, pinching and pulling on each other’s tubing as they frolicked in the shallows.
Swim fast.
The shark disappeared into the murky depths.
The man felt vulnerable without it. If he failed to keep himself afloat, there would be nothing to save him. Adult learners were not permitted to use tubing on their legs or arms; they had to swim on muscle power alone.
He remembered his L-8 instructors, wet and terrified as they laid him on the diving platform’s metal and turned him on his side so that he had peered down into the pool again and search for his classmate’s shape sunk in all that bottom slime. But he hadn’t found it. WG divers wouldn’t find it for two days. When they finally did, fast in muck, the man had decided he would never touch anything from the cold deep again.
Then he thought of Silvi, of the promise he’d made her to finally learn, the pride he would feel when he showed her that he could swim on his own. They could come here for their first real date — swim a while in the shallow end before venturing past the float line where he had learned his clunky strokes. Perhaps the shark would be working that day; he could introduce them to each other.
He began crawling toward the ladder in that awkward S formation, scooping one handful of water after another with his cupped hands and kicking every second stroke with his feet. He was splashing far too much, but the distance between his pumping body and the promising ladder had closed to eight meters, then six, three.
He knew his lurching stroke was juvenile and ungainly, but he didn’t care. It was good enough to keep himself afloat in the warm surface waters, far away from the memory of that boy’s body sinking in the deep.
The man was breathing hard, his legs kicking in spasms as he reached for the ladder’s cool metal handrails. In his pruned fingers, the handrails felt like slippery tentacles.
The man hardly noticed the pressure wave swelling beneath him, the gray fusiform body rising from the pool’s depths like a motored leviathan, speeding toward his dangling naked legs. He had just placed his left foot on the first rung when the shark overpowered him, jaws agape, eyes rolled back in ghost blindness.
Copyright © 2026 by Brennan Thomas
