Short Story Assignment--A Very Selfish Seagull

A seagull sits in the bay, struggling with a plastic 6-pack holder around his neck. Exhausted and exasperated, he gives up at getting the rings off. A second seagull notices his plight and feels sorry, so he goes over to share some of his fish. The second seagull approaches, and the first looks at him depressed. The second rips the head off of his fish and pushes it with his beak towards the first. The first seagull looks at it excitedly. Suddenly, he lunges forward, grabs the fish’s body in his beak, and flies off! The second seagull chases after him angrily. The first seagull tosses the fish into the air, catches and gulps it down, then starts laughing as he flies away. Suddenly several other seagulls from the bay have joined the effort to chase him down. He looks back and gets startled at them all, then flies off as fast as he can, escaping.

The seagull goes to land on a boardwalk on the other side of the bay. He comes down by a bench, but his 6-pack rings get snagged on the bench, causing him to have a less-than-graceful landing. Frustrated, he starts struggling with his rings again. A person sitting on the opposite side of the bench exclaims “ohh..” at seeing the seagull fumble to the ground and struggle. The seagull gets startled at the sound and stares sternly at the person, sizing him up. The person throws some of his popcorn on the boardwalk for the seagull. The seagull, still looking very stern, looks at the popcorn, then back at the human. Without warning, the seagull jumps at the person! Amidst the flurry of waving limbs and flapping wings starts eating all the popcorn right out of the bag in his hand. He then takes off, with the human yelling angrily and shaking his fist at him. As he flies away, he looks back at the shouting person, and laughs.

The seagull looks back to the bay, and sees that the other seagulls are still in a flurry, so he decides to avoid going back there. Looking around the water, he spies a random log off in the distance, further out from the bay. He decides to land by it. The log is a broken off part of a tree trunk, with a single branch poking out into the air. He lands beside the log and starts fiddling with his rings again, to no avail. Suddenly, he looks up with an almost startled expression. His expression changes to caution as he starts looking around him. Then, he looks down. He takes off, but gets his rings caught on the log’s branch. Out of nowhere a shark leaps out of the water! It swallows him whole, and sinks back into the water. The log sits there shaking. Random feathers from the seagull settle onto the water. Everything becomes still again just as quickly as it had been stirred up.