Every now and again, a great white mistakes a surfboard’s outline for the shape of a seal. Perhaps it was the blood from a cut on the ankle which prompted it to take a bite; perhaps it was just the sun obscuring its already-poor eyesight. The water need not be murky.

The shark bursts to the surface in a flash of white and grey, the muzzle popping above the waves. Only a morsel of a bite is necessary to snap the brittle plastic in two—an arm, maybe a leg, was tooth-snagged by the way. After taking a taste, the great white finds the meal inexplicably unseal-like, and swims away in search of another meal.

In search of another meal…it’s the sort of thing you hear in documentaries. Not what you would think about when a flash of fin has left a life dangling in its wake, like a limb’s tenuous connection to the torso by a thin scrap of skin. Which is precisely the scrape my friend is in.

A heap of something was taken to the graveyard and buried in a hole. The shark took my friend, and a little later, a forsaken tooth is all we have left of the encounter. And a bizarre tendency to rhyme for no reason at all. Words can look like one another. A surfboard can look like a seal.