In her past life Elsa was an oceanographer and National Geographic explorer-in-residence, famed for her exploration of underwater cave systems throughout the Americas. Now, four years after her husband perished on a dive in Mexico, she worked as a shark scientist for the Sri Lankan Sharks Board Maritime Center (SBMC), an NGO that owned and maintained all of the shark safety gear and nets along the country’s southern coastline. It was a small operation with only ten employees, and there was always something to keep her occupied. If you’d asked her ten years ago what she thought she’d be doing with her life at forty-two, would it have been this? No. Nevertheless, she enjoyed her work and was starting to find peace with herself, something that had long eluded her.
Pushing these thoughts aside, Elsa entered the SBMC building through the front door. “Good morning, Christine,” she said to the young Sri Lankan girl seated at her desk on the other side of the rectangular-shaped room. Christine, twenty-one, was fresh out of university, bright-eyed, and pretty enough to turn most men’s heads.
She pressed her palms together beneath her chin and said, “Kohomada, Doctor. Some storm last night! Almost blew the roof off my house.”
Elsa wasn’t sure whether the girl was speaking figuratively or literally, though she suspected it was the latter. Christine had yet to move out of her family home, a cinderblock structure with a corrugated iron roof in a shantytown overrun by wild fowl and stray dogs. She lived alongside three older brothers and a younger sister, which was most likely why she was always the first to the office building in the morning and one of the last to leave in the afternoon or early evening.
“I didn’t even hear the storm,” Elsa admitted. “I sleep like a baby, I guess.”
“I never get that saying,” Christine said. “Babies wake up at all hours of the night, don’t they?”
“How about…like a log?”
“Do logs sleep?”
“Too early for this, Christine.” Elsa dropped her handbag at her desk. “I haven’t even had my coffee yet. Speaking of which, got you one too.” She handed the girl one of the two coffees she’d picked up at the seaside town’s only Starbucks.
Christine’s big eyes lit up; on her salary, Starbucks was a rare luxury. “Oh! You didn’t have to!” she said, accepting the paper cup, popping off the lid, and looking inside.
“It’s a cinnamon latte.”
“Yum!” She sipped, then said, “Mark caught a shark in one of the Matara nets about an hour ago. He’s on his way back to shore right now.”
Elsa’s mouth twisted in concern. She was pleased the safety nets worked to protect swimmers from possible shark attacks. Yet at the same time, every dead shark weighed on her conscience. Far from being the monsters of the deep portrayed in Hollywood movies, they rarely attacked humans, and when they did, it was usually a case of mistaken identity, confusing humans for their regular prey. Most importantly, sharks were essential to the overall wellbeing of the ocean’s ecosystem, and any dramatic change to their population would have a devastating effect all the way down the food chain.