Florence Sunnen, “Bone Sharks/Ossicles”

The sway of their miniature bodies spans across the room. Grown from a drum, clamped onto a snail. When asked to provide an account of what it sees, the cartoon mind cannot describe what’s there, because it sees two sharks dancing, kissing blind, pale as bone, and this account remains unsaid. The room is a cave, cradling the sharks’ bone mouths as they dissolve into each other. The bone sharks have no skin, the sandpaper has melted from their surface. They have no teeth, no features other than the melted twist of a fin. They are only as shark as they need to be, oscillating in the antechamber, pushing in and out of one other, not ceasing as long as there is sound in the air.

Behind the drum is a space as speechless as the night before intelligence, at midpoint between outside world and mind, where there is only movement, no meaning allotted as yet, no resolution to the code. It is the driest place on earth, where the air moves like water and all water is confined to memory. Here, the sharks don’t swim but levitate, it is nearly a falling as their bodies merge, bound across the distance of the aching cave.

Underneath his waves, the living shark is hungry. The small hole next to its eye hears as if it sees the thrashing of the vulnerable, of those who are cut and bleeding out, who cannot go on. This ear, which hears the fear of dying, is ruthlessly internal, an aerophone sack buried deep inside the shark, under a thick layer of sandpaper skin, scales covering its surface like brittle stars, like arrowheads in a set formation. Unlike hairs these arrowheads are blind. They translate nothing for any kind of brain.

The bone sharks have no skin, they are not abrasive or predacious, they are in their purest state. No eyes, no ears, no brain, all they are is yearning. They are not for themselves, bound as they are to other things. The first shark bound to the virginal drum, from which it grows like a mushroom stem, sucking up what comes through from the outside world. The second shark is tethered to the cartilage snail, internalising everything. Bound to a snail, bound to a drum, bound to each other by their leaning heads in the eyeless calm that comes from mutual desire. Sound is funnelled through, pulling them apart and back together as if between them winds a string, a trust that what will move the one will also move the other. They align unquestioningly, wanting only to be felt, which is closest to being seen. They lean but couldn’t say what it is they are perceiving, because language does not flow through the particles popping in the middle ear.

But a bone shark is no living creature, it has no boundaries, no needs. The real shark lives amidst suffering, in avoidance of, in contribution to. When the underwater shark is hungry it has to listen with an ear buried deep inside its head, nearly featureless, with just enough countenance to express an unwavering will. Inside its hole the shark ear bides the time until its path is crossed by a frequency it can grab and drag into the dark with it, drown inside the well of hearing space.

The shark ear shivers for the frequency of suffering, of giving up. It hears acceleration in this world’s infinite tank, it hears the widening of gaps inside the agonising flesh. Shooting through water, the frequency comes tugging at the ring roads of the woodwind ear, which provide the shark with balance so it doesn’t, in its fury, lose sight of the flat horizon of its needs and collide with the intimate flesh of another shark, one or both bodies sent spinning uncontrollably.

The bone sharks have no horizon but each other. Do they seek violence to still their appetite? Have they moved on to kinder things? Their bone bodies bear no hunger, there are no ring roads in their ears, no reeds feeding sound back into a sack, they do not hear the rumble of suffering, there is no need. Their channels are blocked by interference, an interference caused by having what they crave, and being made entirely of air and bone. Inside the chamber, black and flashing red, the darkness is a closed space, and the sharks sway inside its intimacy, shudder with each sound that reaches in. Their bodies push and pull, closer in and further away, the sway is an endless one. They don’t breathe but their bodies move as if they do, as if they are each other’s air, all around them moves like air, or the water in which living sharks can swim, listening for a far away man to drown at sea, a fish to be gutted by another, an albatross to fall heavy with wet wings into the open arms of a wave. The sharks living in their briny water listen for what moves, for what stirs a helpless froth, their teeth are endless when the frequency is right.

Inside the cave, waterless, the air is waves, and the blind sharks hold their heads together, throbbing quietly inside meaning’s antechamber, before the sound goes through them both and into the clamp tied against the meaning-making cartilage, where the trembling weaves into a neural code, a message dished up to the brain as food might be.

But what happens when the body dies? When the body becomes still, it isn’t any less an object in the world, and though emitting stillness death does not make it impervious to the moment taking place around it. The body cannot stop responding to the fluttering of wind, to the fall of shrapnel, to being nuzzled by a hungry dog. The mechanics of hearing are involuntary even if the message cannot be delivered because the brain has died.

The sharks throb quietly, not concerned with meaning, imparting only the pressure they receive. As long as there is sound, they are caught in the waves. There is no stillness in their embrace, as long as the world makes sound and the ear receives it, the sharks are given to and taken from each other. Their shape is minute, doll-like, dancing in a wind-up music box. Their bodies are bone and will take a while to give in to decay. Decay will happen in time, long after the heart has stopped pumping its rush. But that is later. Right now, the ear is here, the sound is here, and the flesh of the brain, now unblinking, is still here, why not pretend that hearing still occurs? Nobody here to attest to the contrary. The dancing shark bones don’t know, it is not up to them to know: all they hear is one another. Speak into the dead ear all you like, speak as if it were a face, what’s one more hail of sounds in this ceaseless sway, as the bone sharks wallow in their bodies touching in the cave, in the care of a self extinguished.

Only later, beyond the shark bones in their lair, does sound turn into message. For now, the bones inside the dead man’s ear live in blissful holding, because we are in the midnight phase of things, and none of this can matter yet, not the midnight phone call telling us the man has died, nor the fact that in a matter of minutes a shark has ripped a drowning dog limb from limb, nor the violence that starts anew at each dawn. The cave is as peaceful as the night before the war breaks out, before the phone rings and the unwanted meaning catches up with us. When the body dies, the hearing organs start to wait in the dark for the last of the cilia, in their arrowhead arrangements, to disintegrate. And then, the waves of sound will run out of things to tickle and go rubbing unobstructed along smooth, abstinent, immovable bone.