Four feet long—said one man, his hands held out to show the size.

Another said—You kidding? Five feet at least.

She just wanted to find out if the third guy wanted another margarita, but they kept her there instead, describing how hard the shark fought as they dragged it still thrashing onto the boat, how close they had gotten to being bit. She was concentrating on their lips, each word a struggle. The background noise of some engine interfering, so she lost more and more of the words. Meanwhile they lounged in their chairs, young and sunburned and muscled, while they looked her over.

Then their eyes jerked up and froze, something behind her.

Partly deaf, she had gotten used to the concept of sudden. The honk she didn’t hear, the heads-up! she’d missed. Warning sounds were a luxury she didn’t have. She’d gotten trained to just react.

A shadow rising over her.

She turned, glimpsing the yacht backing up, too close, too fast, wrong angle. The white perfection of its stern. The start of the slow-motion impact, the crunch of wood and weight.

So she vaulted the table, the heel of her hand square in the men’s fries, her legs tucked up and over, her feet landing in the small space between the chairs, the men still staring, mouths open, their nice meal in front of them, as she sprinted away.

One of them ended up in the hospital, while she continued her shift without injury.

* * *

The next morning, she arrived at the research center at dawn. She hadn’t called the restaurant yesterday to say she quit. It was possible she’d already lost her job. She didn’t care: all those people, the garbled words, her confusion.

At the lagoon, she used the pool skimmer to clean up all the floating uneaten fish leftover feeding from yesterday. It looked like the dolphins hadn’t eaten one piece, not even after she’d left. She stripped down to her bathing suit, dropping her clothes on one of the chairs, waded in and began to snorkel slowly through the shallows.

Alarmed, the dolphins huddled together on the far side of the lagoon like yesterday. She puttered about ignoring them, searching for mussels, glancing at the dolphins only every once in a while. She didn’t approach them. Their sounds bounced around in her gut and bones.

A ray gun shooting bursts.

She could taste them in her mouth, feel them in her teeth, hear them in her sinuses.

Marbles dropped one by one into a can.

Gradually, the dolphins got less scared. They eased closer, 40 feet, 30 feet, examining her from the left, then the right eye. They rotated upside down to look at her that way. Their sounds changed.

The roar of a gorilla sped up so fast it sounded like a chickadee.

Even in the periphery of her mask, their sheer size was apparent, weighing three to five times as much as she did.

One by one, over the next hour, they reached the same conclusion and twisted away, accepting her in their lagoon.