Dawn Miller

​Shark Boy

Go on, open it, the father says, startling the boy. I found it in your mother’s closet. 

The boy takes the red sparkly package—nearly as long as he is tall—from under the half-decorated tree. He slides a finger under the crisscrossed tape, and the shiny paper rustles to the floor. Heart boxing his ribcage, he clutches the stuffed blue-grey shark.  

She remembered. 

He’d pointed it out to her at the toy store after she read him The Bravest Fish months ago.  

Now, he peers inside the shark’s gaping maw, the tongue soft and fuzzy, and pulls out yet another shark, palm-length, and identical. 

That night the boy and his father eat turkey, sweet potatoes, and apple pie, all brought by neighbours in dishes covered with tin foil, but the food sticks in the boy’s throat. His father falls asleep on the couch while the television blares happy families, and the boy shuffles to his room, the shark dragged behind, the dorsal fin scoring a long, dark line in the plush carpet like an incision. 

Bedroom door shut, the boy flicks the shark’s soft cartoon teeth. Inspects its snow-white belly and marble eyes. He shoves his hand into its mouth, and his freckled forearm disappears down the gullet. Fingertips snag on a ripped seam, and he pushes until stitches release and the shark’s insides fall apart just like the silvery body of the trout his dad cleaned when the three of them camped by the lake before everything changed.  

Inside the shark, the down is soft. The boy grasps a handful of the innards—like the parts the doctors removed from his mother even though it didn’t help—and pulls out a fistful of fluff. 

Again and again he shoves his hand inside the hollow, each time removing another billowy cloud. Fluff drifts onto his bookcase, settles on the smaller shark and on shelved books: How to Survive a Shark Attack and No Time for Fear: Tales of Survival. A clump floats onto the framed photo of his mother smiling as if everything is perfectly fine.  

Bit by bit the shark shrinks thinner and thinner until its back and belly wrinkle like folds of skin hanging from bones.  

The boy slips one bare foot inside the empty carcass, then jams in his other foot. He tugs the fabric up up up—a new skin, one brave and strong like his mom told him to be.  

The shark’s soft teeth tickle his shoulders. He wriggles his feet, fluttering the tail. 

You grew inside of me, his mother said, a hand pressed to her stomach, and the boy imagined a miniature self—brown hair, glasses, and light-up sneakers—peering at the world through his mother’s belly button. He should’ve stayed there forever, taken up all the room inside so nothing bad could grow. 

His head pokes through the fish’s wide mouth, and he slaps his tail against the mattress, a sad thud.  

The door creaks open. His father, in the doorway.  

What are you doing, Peter?  

I’m not Peter. I’m Shark Boy, he says, words muffled.  

His father says nothing. Just stands there, and Shark Boy watches him rub the stubble on his chin. Glance at his mother’s picture partly hidden by fluff. 

His father’s shoulders soften, and he approaches. Shark Boy’s heart beats loud like a giant’s. 

The bed creaks as his father sits, and the mattress shifts as he stretches on the bed beside Shark Boy—just like his mother did when she was well, and she’d read to him about Bull Sharks and Blacktips. Hammerheads and Great Whites.  

Then I guess I’ll be Shark Dad, his father says. 

Shark Boy holds his breath at the strange, solid warmth of his father’s body. The quiet of the house, now not so scary. He flaps his enormous tail with all his might, and a fierce splash echoes.  

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Image by Sabrina So from Pexels

Dawn Miller’s work appears in The Forge, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Pithead Chapel, Vestal Review, Toronto Star, Room Magazine, Bath Flash Fiction anthologies, Best Microfiction 2024 and 2025, and elsewhere. She is the proud recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts grant and lives in Picton, Ontario, Canada. Connect on IG @dawnmillerwriter and Bluesky @dawnwriter.bsky.social.

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