Aliens and giants: part two

Continued from "Aliens and giants: part one." Still squatting, I look up at my brother and squint because the sun is shining in my eyes. I’m sure he’s lying because he’s jealous that I found the alien and not him. Behind Danny I see a giant walking towards us. He’s carrying a long, metal weapon in one hand. It’s hard to see what the giant is carrying in the other hand because the sun is glinting off the metal and shining in my eyes. I’m pretty sure it’s a severed head he’s carrying, dangling from his grip on its hair. Should I turn into a mermaid with beautiful, shiny green and blue scales so I can swim away before the giant can get us? He probably has a collection of shrunken heads at home like the ones I’ve seen at the wax museum in St. Petersburg. Will I be one of his shrunken heads dangling from around his neck? Will he grind my bones to make “oh juice” for his soup? I’m much too little and skinny to make a decent meal for a giant. I prepare for the sound of crunching and tearing and see my own blood spurting from my headless neck. I hope this doesn’t hurt too much. Daddy says, “Come on you guys. Let’s go. We’re going fishing now.” He sees the dead floating alien and leans over to look at it with us. “Hammerhead. Fisherman probably caught him and dumped him.” I know that daddy would never lie to me so I guess Danny was telling the truth. Reluctantly, I leave the dead alien/hammerhead shark for the gulls and crabs to finish. I tag along behind daddy and Danny as we walk under the Tampa Bay Bridge with our fishing poles and our bait bucket. A hammerhead shark. I’d seen the regular kind of sharks before with the big jaws and teeth. I’d even found shark’s teeth on the beach and in the fields on daddy’s farm. How would it feel to have the jaws of a shark crunching down around my leg? Would I wind up in his belly next to an old shoe, a license plate, some tin cans, and a few hundred anchovies like Jonah in the Bible? If I didn’t die from the shark bite, I could have something even more interesting than arrowheads and shark’s teeth for show-and-tell at school. My classmates would gather round me and gawk at my scar while I told my story about how I managed to escape (just barely, mind you) going down the gullet of a large, hungry man-eating shark, or in my case, a little girl-eating shark. I imagine them hanging on my every word. I’d be the most popular girl at school for at least a week. I might even get out of homework for a while. It just might be worth it. To be continued...