Undergraduate Creative Upper Level Writing4

A Case of Mistaken Identity

The Great White Shark - Beauty or the Beast

It was one of those perfect summer days . The sun was shining , the air was clear , and from the look of the crowded beach , everyone had had the same idea : swimming . I walked across the hot sand until I found a place to put my towel . I sat down and looked around me . Everywhere people were laughing and having a good time , the mood was infectious , and I smiled I looked out towards the ocean , a little girl who couldn

't have been older than four was sitting in the shallows , intently examining a hermit crab , whilst her mother carefully switched her watchful gaze between her and her brothers , who were laughing and splashing each other behind her Further out , a boy of seventeen held a fully clothed girl above the waves , threatening to drop her in as she screamed and giggled and begged him not to drop her , although you could tell from her smile that she was enjoying the attention . Much further out , three surfers sat in their wetsuits , propped up on their surfboards , waiting for that elusive perfect wave . And that 's when I saw it . A sudden movement out of the corner of my eye . There , on the surface of the water . A black shape there one minute and gone the next . But that was all it took for my blood to turn to ice . In a second , my stomach dropped and a sudden terrifying fear gripped me . I wanted to run and scream to them to get out of the water , but fear kept me routed to the spot , and the adrenalin pumping through my veins left me overwhelmed and unable to utter a single sound . Luckily , I wasn 't the only one who had seen it , and the warning rang out from somewhere over to my left . A single terrifying word , first just a whisper and then screamed over the noise of the waves . Toaster

What ? It 's not what you were expecting ? Well of course not . Peter Benchley never wrote a book about the dangers of household appliances and Stephen Spielberg never directed a movie that featured a toaster moving menacingly through the kitchen to two utterly terrifying notes that sped up as it got closer and closer to its unwitting target , who was happily involved in some everyday task , not knowing that their life was about to be cut short . But , while toasters may have been a more realistic choice of nemesis , since Jaws was released in 1975 , people from all over the world have been gripped and united by a single fear . A single word , able to illicit a mass panic : Shark

The fact that last year alone , 791 people worldwide were killed by faulty toasters , while only 9 were killed by sharks , doesn 't seem to bother anyone in the slightest . Nor does the fact the more people are killed each year in the U .S . by...