We are in the condo’s mirrored entrance hall when my mom first tells me. The Crocodile Hunter is dead. To answer my first and most obvious question: No, it wasn’t. It was a stingray.
We ride the elevator down, my sunburnt cousins arguing over shovels and frisbees, and my mom declares a round of the Quiet Game. I win, not sure whether it is a game or a moment of silence. The doors ping open at every other floor, but nobody gets on or off.
On the beach my cousins dig for mole crabs, my grandmother drinks Diet Coke, my mom reads People magazine and I sit cross-legged in the shade of the umbrella, celebrating a day-old diagnosis of photosensitivity. The Florida sun has welcomed me with a blotchy, under-the-skin itch. I listen to the waves and bury my legs in the sand.
The concentration of salt in seawater is thirty-five parts per thousand. Human blood has only nine parts per thousand. As I wade ankle-deep into the ocean, still wearing my hat and shirt, the water that splashes up my legs is infinitesimally diluted.
Years later, at a different beach, a walk on the boardwalk leaves me with a massive splinter embedded in my heel. I can see it there, a shadow lurking deep within my flesh. It takes tweezers, twenty minutes and a knife from the Swiss Army to dig it out.
Apparently, had the Crocodile Hunter resisted the reflex to pull out the barb, he might have survived. But instead he pulled the four-foot splinter out, and changed the salinity of the waters off Australia.
His survival probably would have meant the stingray’s death. I believe that would have saddened him. There’s this absurd image in my head of Steve Irwin waiting in an E.R. waiting room with a massive stingray splashing about in a fishbowl he is holding in his lap. “Isn’t she a beaut?” he says.
I stand at the water’s edge, watching the seagulls circle and dive, and wonder how big the stingrays grow in Florida.
Collin Van Son is a member of the class of 2018. He is majoring in physics with minors in English and mathematics. Outside of writing, he also enjoys performing with the on-campus club No Refund Theatre. His fiction has previously appeared in the Hofstra Journal of Literature and Art.