apex predators of the underwater food chain.

Our dad was a good artist. He could draw anything. We’d ask him to draw our favourite cartoons, and then draw us playing with them.

For a while I had a pretty good picture of myself playing kickball with some of the the Care Bears. He’d let me colour in the symbols on their stomachs. I was careful, outlining first in Crayola felt and then colouring gently all in one direction, respectful of the delicate scratches of his expressive ink pen.

The best thing he’d draw would be sharks. Me and my brothers were crazy about sharks. We collected shark books, stickers, posters. There was a book at the library we checked out again and again for it’s detailed illustrations and enlarged photographs of skin texture, snout pores and wide-open mouth shots where you could look and see their dark throats.

Heaven was flipping through the channels on a Sunday afternoon and stumbling across the distinctive unsteady film of a PBS underwater documentary. The film and  technology available to marine scientists in the ’70s and ’80s inevitably lent an odd cast to the footage — grainy yet somehow sun scorched, the waves dotting the lens with droplets as the camera tried to provide the dual view of the scientists and divers working purposefully on the surface and that fathomless, no-boundaries blue.

The black wink of a shark looking into the camera, their prehistoric gaze that evoked indifferent death yet also the blameless glass eyes of teddy bears.

“Draw a shark,” was something we requested of our dad, often. “Draw a shark eating us.”

He was good at drawing especially fearsome Great Whites, and it was a thrill to watch his pen, the same one used for his crossword puzzles, limn in our dead bodies expertly, bathing suits in place and Xs for eyes, the jaws of a predator sinking into our cartoon skin.