Quint’s Happy Ending: A Jaws Erasure
Image credit: Gustave Le Gray. “The Breaking Wave,” 1857. The Art Institute of Chicago.
Text: Benchley, Peter. Jaws. Doubleday, 1974.
Spite Defense
The men stood with arms crossed, on opposite sides of their unfenced property line.
The taller man pointed. “Your leaf is touching my leaf.”
“No,” said the shorter man, pointing two inches to the left. “Your vine is touching my twig. And anyway, that’s not my leaf.”
“Just look at that twig——” began the taller man, but then he was clutching his belly, the hilt of his neighbor’s knife jiggling there as he struggled for breath. He sank to his knees, but not before finding the pistol he’d packed in preparation for such an encounter. Soon both men were prone in the street. The blacktop’s cracks ran red.
Having heard the shot, the women emerged and discovered their fallen spouses. Their eyes met.
“Your husband’s blood is pooling in front of my house,” said the shorter woman.
“That’s not my husband’s blood,” said the taller woman, holding a corkscrew, adjusting her grip.
Tracy Royce’s writing appears in / is forthcoming in Bending Genres, Does It Have Pockets?, The Ekphrastic Review, ONE ART, Scrawl Place, and elsewhere. She lives in Southern California, where she hikes and obsesses over Richard Widmark movies. Her current favorite is Night and the City, in which Widmark careens through the streets of London, trying to outrun Herbert Lom’s vengeance. Find her on Bluesky.
