B-Movie

Nothing brings a man and woman together like a prehistoric shark, that 150 million-year-old fish with a face like a chainsaw. You are a marine biologist in hot shorts and I am an unemployed crocodile wrestler. We’ll get suspicious after your sister, a sorority girl at Western Michigan University, goes missing on Fourth of July weekend. No one notices that all the grizzled fishermen are absent, but when all those chicks on jet-skis have been consumed, someone calls the cops. The rest of the state is skeptical, but when the creature pulls down a weather helicopter out of the sky, the army is called in to obliterate everything. In the end, it will be just you, me and that gigantic fin skimming the water. I’ll grab it by the gills, and you will puncture its eye with a leftover bottle rocket. We will act fast, but we don’t have to act well because this is all we need: the lake, a spark, and our sandals waiting for us at the dock.

Todd Kaneko lives and writes in Grand Rapids, MI where he teaches at Grand Valley State University. His stories and poems are forthcoming or have recently appeared in Puerto Del Sol, Portland Review, Fairy Tale Review, The Southeast Review, Superstition Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere.