When people ask, I tell them that I was born in a seashell, emerged in a cloud of salt and foam. But between you and me, I’m from Savannah. That’s something about me that a lot of people don’t know, and certainly wouldn’t guess.
In my early childhood, I’d walk out to the shore and pretend that my breath was pushing the waves back into the ocean. My first memory in this life is of a seashell splitting my heel open, my ever-anxious father washing it off in the stinging Atlantic and carrying me back home, terribly worried about how much blood my tiny body had in reserve. As soon as I started going to school, I fell in love with the scar. I’d take off those terrible Mary Janes and show the boys at the sandbox that pale line down my foot.
Yes, is this Mrs. Lee? (My teacher said through the wires of our lovely new home telephone). No, no, Astrid’s fine. She’s just—well—she took her shoes off during show-and-tell again. She’s telling the class that she fought a shark.
In time, I started to remember the shark attack. The jaws, the blood, the headlines: Breaking News, June 28th, 1949: Infant Narrowly Escapes Death, Fends off Tiger Shark! I was only eleven when I realized that I’d hand-crafted that memory just a few years prior, and my brain, caught in a lie, quickly discarded the shark and replaced it with the truth: a thin white shell that left a thin white scar.
I was a well-loved child. Before too much oddness set in, and before it was beaten out of those around me, we’d head out in droves towards a perfect, emerald-green field, making swords and grass braids and dozens of kinds of mud. Every scraped knee was a campfire story and each dirt mixture was a potion. Good rocks could hatch dragons, bad rocks were blunt weapons. And though being a boyish girl didn’t win over everyone, it was still endearing to most, as I still had so many years left to grow out of that juvenile masculinity.
When I was eight, a boy named James hit me with a wooden ruler. He was sent to the principal’s office and I was given a jelly-filled ice pack. Four years later, when he tried to kiss me for the first time, I spit in his eyes. That time, I was the one sent to Dr. Renfield’s office to explain myself. I was never built to be a lawyer, but I got off without more than a slap on the wrist and a note to my parents. Despite a weak scolding at the dinner table, I could see my father smirking at me the second I handed over the disciplinary note. When he put me to bed that night, he told me: “For what it’s worth, I think you were right to spit on him.”
But I was inconsolable, and stayed up late thinking about how terrible it all was. Despite all the commotion around the spitting—an action that I hardly even chose to do—I felt the whole world closing in on me at the memory of his mouth. As the scrapes healed on my knees, as we learned about ancient Greece and multiplying fractions, I suffered the terrible realization that I was most likely going to be a girl for the rest of my life, and that meant that my two options were to kiss or to spit. For the second time, I felt the tiger shark’s jaws on me. If my parents hadn't raised me Godless, perhaps I could tell you about Jonah and the Whale. But if you’d prefer a story with less of a moral (but more women), for your consideration is my own parable of Astrid and the Shark.