I wrote a short story about a shark attack

A few years ago I wrote this short story about a man recollecting a shark attack. It's just been sitting on a hard drive treading water, but I thought this sub might get a kick out of it:It was a beautiful day. I was in Hawaii, alone. I went there on a solo vacation, to get away from commercials and shopping malls and highways and family. Turns out there was plenty of all that stuff in Hawaii anyway, just in a more tropical form. But when I went to the beach I could get a moment or two of escape from all that. There was a cove a few miles from my hotel, where the land met the sea in a steep grassy decline, where the lack of sandy beach kept the flocks of tourists away, replaced instead with flocks of seagulls and just this natural silence that you couldn’t get on the main beaches.Anyway, I could spend hours in the ocean, and I often did. I’d put on goggles and a snorkel and jump in, floating at the surface, looking down at the coral and fish below. You spend a few hours in the sea and you get into this state of mind like everything makes sense, it’s kinda funny. Kinda spiritual. Anyway, this particular day seemed no different than the others, except the water was a little bit murkier, so I was having trouble seeing some of the activity – I remember thinking, “This must be what it’s like to watch Planet Earth in standard definition”.I was floating there a while. I guess I’d floated pretty far out, but I didn’t notice because I hadn’t brought my head out of the water in so long. I remember I was watching a sea turtle glide around the sand and rocks at the bottom, and thinking how much it reminded me of a blimp, just slowly floating around from stop to stop. Then it sped up and swam towards the cove all of a sudden, which I thought was strange because those things are usually so damn slow, and calm. Then I saw why. Out the corner of my eye a dark shape moved, not too far below me, probably around 20 feet away. I looked over, and there was this huge animal, massive and grey, menacing, just swimming, circling me. At first I thought it was a submarine or a whale, but upon further inspection I saw it was a shark – and from its size, it could only be a great white. It circled me for a moment, and we just stared at each other. I don’t know if I was in shock or what, but it didn’t quite register at first – I just stared at it, and I remember thinking how massive it was, and it was strange something so large could actually float. My heart was pounding, I could feel it everywhere. I thought the shark must be able to feel my heartbeat through the water, I think the whole ocean could feel that heartbeat. My face heated up, my limbs went sorta numb and tingly, and a mixture of fear and adrenaline and something else I can’t describe coarsed through my veins.My breathing had become forced, quick, in, out, in, out – I had to conduct myself. I was right side up now, vertical, and snorkels don’t work too well in that position. I breathed in a big gulp of seawater, and I coughed. And as I coughed, I jolted, I convulsed, I splashed, my goggles filled with water as I tried to collect myself – I instinctually tried to plant my feet but there was obviously no ground, I was in the ocean, alone, except for the 20 foot shark watching me. I sunk a few feet, still coughing, as I reached above for air.I surfaced a second later and removed my goggles to let the water out. I looked around me, and the surface of the water was calm except for the ripples and waves I’d caused in my panic attack. It was empty of any shark fins, which at first was a relief, for a split second I told myself I’d imagined the whole thing, nothing like that could ever happen to me. I really wanted to believe that. Then I remembered a special I’d seen about sharks, great whites in particular, and how they attack from below, and with ferocious speed. I had about two seconds to drown in terror. I’m not even going to try to explain what I was thinking in that moment, because I just can’t. Get in the water knowing there’s a massive shark somewhere around you, underneath you, and you’ll understand.It hit me hard. Very hard. I’ve been hit by a car before, and cars hit you hard, but nothing like a 20 foot shark swimming full tilt. I felt an intense tightness around my thigh and my pelvis – a pressure more than anything else, like I was being squished between two boulders, no pain, at least not yet. That’s not to say I was comfortable. I felt my skin and flesh tearing, I felt hundreds of razor blades grinding against my bones, tearing my ligaments, lighting my muscles on fire, destroying me. It seems strange, but I remember for a split second locking eyes with the shark and wondering what it was thinking, what was going through its little tiny brain. Then I thought, hey, that’s not important right now. The attack continued.My hands immediately reached in front of me and planted on the shark’s face – grasping its nose, digging into its eyes, scratching and scraping and punching. It felt like hitting cement. I looked down and saw the shark’s teeth and gums sinking into my skin, through my muscle, clamping onto my bones, spitting out red seawater. Then it dragged me under. My goggles filled with water, my snorkel was gone. I opened my eyes and they burned, and through the thick red haze I could just make out the blurry image of a massive dark shape eating me alive from below, dragging me down into its abyss. I’d become stunned, sort of frozen, like it was all just happening too fast for me to react, this was all too unreal. I had to remind myself to fight back. I kicked it with my one free leg, I punched it, and I’m pretty sure I was yelling the entire time. I grew weak very quickly.Then it let go. As quickly as it had begun, the shark opened its vice grip jaws, the jaws of death, and spit me out like a bad sardine, and it was gone. I was left floating in a limbo of my blood and pain, suspended below the surface, my lungs were empty, it took every ounce of control I had to keep from breathing in seawater, which I knew would kill me if the attack didn’t. I tried to kick to the surface, but my legs didn’t work – I pulled the water with my arms, and the water seemed heavier, like I was swimming in jello.I reached the surface what felt like twenty minutes later, and that was the most amazing breath of my entire life. I tried to swim to shore, I mean I really tried, but something was stopping me – my leg was a dead weight, an anchor, and my arms were weak – all I could do was just float there.I managed to get mostly on my back, floating on the surface, staring at the blue sky above me. A seagull flew overhead. I watched it hover for a second, caught in the wind I guess, and it looked like it was watching me. The water around me felt warm, and almost comfortable. The pain was beginning to emerge at this point, slowly, almost from within, it was an internal kind of pain. It was a pain that throbbed in a grinding ache throughout my entire body, like someone was taking sandpaper to my nervous system. It was an odd feeling. I didn’t particularly like it. My leg itself felt numb, felt empty and detached and dead.I floated there in what I perceived to be my death, not thinking too much about my leg, or the shark, or losing blood – all thoughts that would return – but thinking about my life as a whole. Just stuff like my family, and how I should have talked to them more, and that I should have spent more time with old friends, people who I’d lost touch with. I remember thinking they probably wouldn’t hear the news that I’m dead for months, not until some high school reunion down the line when someone asks “Where’s that Phil guy? Do you remember him?”Then I thought about, well, how little I had to think about. I was disappointed that in my final moments of life I didn’t have some long, dramatic slide show prepared to show in my mind, set to some Enya song or something. I tried to think of a reason to be sad, something that I’d miss or that would miss me, but my mind came up as blank as the blue sky I was staring at. I was disappointed with how present I was, with how the only living things that I got to share my moment of death with were a great white shark and a seagull flying overhead. I remember seeing myself from a third person perspective, my mangled body floating in the waves, and wondering what made me alive any more than the water I was floating in, or the air I was breathing. We’re all just molecules.Anyway, my thoughts traveled to many places in those moments – not places like memories and all that, but impulsive thoughts I couldn’t control, like “I wonder where seagulls go in the winter.” I don’t know how long I’d been floating there, or how long the attack had even lasted. As I floated there, whatever rational part of my mind was left functioning screamed from underneath a pile of mental rubble – There’s a shark in the water, you idiot, you don’t know where it is, you’re bleeding to death, your limb is falling off – and you’re just floating there? What are you doing?I don’t know. What was I doing? It had all happened so quickly. I went from bliss to fear to death in a matter of seconds. My light was fading. Existence blurred. I presume this would be around the time when I’d start feeling cold, like they say in the movies, except the gallons of my blood I was floating in kept me warm. My mind began to shut down at this point, counting down the moments till the shark came back, till it was all over – 5, 4, 3, 2 – I heard a swoosh in the water, I heard ripples and splashes. It’s back, I thought. I braced myself with whatever I could – I felt it coming, I felt its presence, take me, I taunted, eat me, kill me, finish it, I’m done, I’m done, I’m done.Then I heard a motor. I felt rumbling, I heard yells, felt waves. I heard a man’s voice, only partially audible, yelling something, either “Are you okay?” or “Are you gay?” I thought that would be a stupid question either way, but judging from the circumstances I assumed it was the former. The boat pulled up next to me, a blurry image off to one side, as I managed to respond “I’m fine,” – I don’t know if I was being sarcastic or not. I didn’t think people had the capacity for sarcasm in the face of death.