The Whole Truth

When my brother died, perhaps the biggest suprise was that nobody was really suprised at all.

My brother was an escape artist, but not just any ordinary escape artist. Without doing any actual research on the subject, I believe he may very well have pioneered a new form of escape artistry. He wasn't the sort of escape artist who struggled his way out of straight jackets, water tanks, and wet paper bags.

My brother was the sort of esape artist who escaped from live, man killing animals. In the course of his career, he successfully escaped from lions, tigers, a pack of dogs, seafood(he had an allergy), a komodo dragon, a black widow spider, a cobra, some bees(another allergy), a crocodile, and pirahnas, among others.

You have to understand that my brother had a lifelong fear of everything natural. When he was three, our father got drunk(no suprise there) and went to water the lawn. The next day, we found him dead, all wrapped up in the garden hose(also not much of a suprise). But to my brothers' young, impressionable eyes, it was a terrible green snake that had done in the man who had sired him. From then on, he was never comfortable around animals or plants.

When he turned sixteen, he ran away from home and took to living on the streets, prefering to surround himself with skyscraping buildings and man made filth, than remain in our outlying suburbia, with nature just barely visible on the horizon.

Almost ten years went by before any of us ever saw him again, mostly because no one was really interested in what he might be up to. At Christmas, Mom would sometimes get drunk and speculate that he was probably living in an elaborate cardboard mansion or fucking a bottle somewhere. But other than that, we didn't speak of it.

Until, of course, they day of his return, and we saw how wrong we had all been. I mean, sure, he probably had fucked a bottle at least once, but he'd also been up to much more than that. He told us that he'd been facing his fears, and building his courage. He had returned to us, he said, so that all would know that he was now ready to go one on one with Mother Nature... and emerge victorious.

That's how it began. At first, he'd find ways to get inside animal pens at the zoo, and run around for a bit while the animals chased him, then get out. I could tell by the way he screamed that he had not fully mastered his fear just yet.

It wasn't long before his antics began to attract crowds of onlookers. At first, the zoo was understandably miffed at my brother, but they were equally understandably not miffed when they saw he was increasing attendance at the zoo (which means $$$). Even the zoo owner, famed and wealthy philanthropist Bartum Parnac, took an interest in the activity and made a proposal to my brother. They were married in the spring. LOL! Just kidding!

The proposal was actually that Parnac would pay to have my brother travel all over the world to escape from dangerous animals in their natural habitats. My brother couldn't resist. The rest is history, of which you can google the facts up for yourself. I won't go on about them here, with the exception the the final escape attempt. The facts of that fateful day are not well known and much has been said that is not fact at all. Allow me to now set the record straight.

Bartum Parnac was essentially a vaudvilleian showman at heart. Among other testimony to this fact, he insisted that all animals on his properties wear clothes and do tricks or talk. Some many years later, he was tried and convicted for having a sweatshop benethe the zoo, filled with childlabourers making costumes for the animals day and night. But he also owned an aquarium where the animals existed under similar circumstances. This aquarium featured a large open air tank, of the sort where an audience can sit and observe dolphins or whales as the perform a show. At this particular aquarium, however, the performer was no smiling porpoise, but a rather large and ill-tempered tiger shark which was famous for killing the man who captured it with a firearm.

When the day finally arrived, my brother was very excited about escaping from this monster. A enthusiastic crowd filled the stands. Everything was going without a hitch. My brother jumped into the tank. He flailed about for a bit, gaining the sharks attention. The great fish circled ever closer. A woman screamed. Then, a thousand white triangles flashed in the sun as the fish's jaws gaped open and it lunged at the helpless man. For the first time, I was afraid something might go wrong. A man screamed. Might have been my brother. All that screaming was for naught, though, as somehow my brother dodged aside.

My brother began swimming for a platform where the trainers usually stand. The shark dove into the depths of the tank, then suddenly came speeding up directly underneath my brother. Impossible as it seems, he was ready for the shark, and just as it meant to cleave him in twain, he twisted and put his feet apon the tip of the sharks snout.

A great fountain of water erupted as the shark came flying out of the water, my brother standing atop it like a ball balanced on a seals nose. The shark thrashed and arched in the air, and my brother slipped from his precarious perch. The two combatants fell sideways onto the platform my brother had been trying to reach. They crashed down on the hard surface.

To this day, it's never been conclusively decided who was responsible for leaving a gun lying on that platform. All that can be said for sure, is that when that tiger shark landed on top of it, a single shot rang out and my brothers skull was rended into a heck of a lot more pieces than it's supposed to be.

People don't remember my brother much, anymore. Most people only know him as "one of the guys who got shot by that shark". But for me, there was always a little more to it than that. And now you know... The rest of the story!