We have leopard sharks that can’t open their mouths much wider than we can, and even if they could, they just don’t seem to have an affinity for human flesh. The only time we look out for sharks is during the Great White migratory seasons. April and October are the months when those man-eaters swim for Hawaii, Alaska, and Stinson Beach in San Francisco. (They really like that place.)

People just don’t get attacked by sharks in San Diego. In fact, the last confirmed attack was in 1995 on a kayaker in La Jolla. So when a group of pizza makers from Seattle told me that one of their own went down because of a shark bite, I flat out could not believe it.

“At Sea World,” a guy added.

I was awed. What did she do, climb into the tank? Did a petting go bad? Did the viewing tunnel crash down and give the sharks an opportunity to fight back for their freedom? As I pondered all the possibilities, I noticed that the pizza makers were grinning at me.

“You’re messing with me,” I snapped.

“No, really,” a young woman replied. “It was huge. The bite went right through her jeans.”

“Through her jeans?” I was starting to get a little suspicious.

“You know the megalodon?” the woman asked, as if every San Diegan should know all shark species.

I said that I didn’t.

“You know, the shark mouth that people stand in to have their picture taken.”

About this time, the shark victim showed up and I asked for a firsthand account of what happened.

“Well, I climbed into the mouth so they could take a picture, like it was chomping down on me,” she recounted. “Then as I was stepping out, some kid screamed and startled me. I slipped and the point of a tooth went right into my thigh.”

She pointed to a bandaged spot on her inner thigh that was awfully closed to the promised land. “It went right through my jeans. I had to get sixteen stitches, eight inside, eight outside.”

As she told the story, I noticed her necklace, a shark tooth hanging from a silver chain. Her fellow pizza makers bought it for her as a cynical little talisman. I suggested she wipe some blood on the one-inch charm and tell people that it was the tooth she pulled out of her leg.

“It was much bigger than this,” she said anxiously.

As I looked at the bandage on her thigh, I shook my head.  “Well, you’re probably the only person on the planet to be attacked by a shark that’s extinct.”