fishy-words

[fishy-words]

Her hands are rough against mine

She knows how to defend herself

She knows it is better to run than to fight

I have not learned my lesson

My hands are soft

And I am hungry for blood

[fishy-words]

It was never a matter of pride, just a matter of confidence. There’s a limit to how much you can ignore, before ignoring things becomes your main occupation.

[fishy-words]

The Garden Under My Neighbor’s Staircase

On the day of the first cool breeze in thirty days I brought clothes and six quarters to the laundry machine Around the back of my apartment And found my neighbor sitting in the shade

He asked how I was I answered dishonestly So did he, I think What else are neighbors for But talking idly about things we do not understand? I started the laundry machine And we talked from behind our masks while I waited

We talked about the gloom of isolation And We talked about the gods he’s always known And We talked about the vegetables growing In the path of soil beneath his staircase

He showed me his garden His own little slice of the universe He told me about the watermelon sprouts And the raccoons that stone them As they stretched toward the meager light of the moon He told me about the pumpkins that he looked forward to sharing When everything was back to the way it should be

I didn’t have the heart to say The soil wasn’t rich enough to carry life The raccoons would be relentless and clever The blight on the pumpkin leaves would spread The world will never return to the way it was

So instead I said What if we gave the garden richer soil What if we put up nets to keep the raccoons out What if we prune the leaves to hold the blight back So instead I said The garden looks so healthy and vibrant The raccoons will probably give up soon The leaves look so beautiful, and green

So instead I said Nothing can grow here Nothing can keep nature from her quarry Nothing will be left when autumn comes

And I said that I hoped it would be better soon And I said it would all be good in the end And I said that it was never good in the first place, and never would be

And I think one of those is true

[fishy-words]

I am nothing more than a creature of earth. But oh, what a thing to be!

[fishy-words]

I have never seen such beauty as I did when I stood upon that ridge, surrounded by grass green as emerald and thick as wool. The highway stretched behind me, a rich grey that seemed black against the overcast sky. Before me, the ridge curved into a ring, covered in greenery and straddling a cavernous opening into the earth.

At the base of the opening, a still lake stood, flanked by rising stone protrusions that must have reached hundreds of feet into the air. Its surface was a deep blue, well-lit by the sun behind the clouds, though I could not see beneath the surface.

There was no choice to make. I clambered down the dewy grass slope to the cavern's mouth, and jumped.

The lake's surface rushed to meet me, stone textures blending into the noise of the wind, as I plummeted towards the surface. The water was close, close enough to touch. I saw a wooden dock near the shore. I could almost see beneath the surface. I could almost hear it.

Then I was hundreds of feet above the water. The lake's surface rushed to meet me. Then I was dozens of feet above the water. The lake's surface rushed to meet me. Then I was a foot above the water. The lake's surface rushed to meet me.

And then it stopped. Some force suspended me above the lake's placid surface, despite my protests. I struggled as it pulled me back to the brink, and condemned me to a lifetime of wondering what hid beneath the water.

[fishy-words]

But the fact remains: there is no civilization without cooperation, no culture without understanding. Perhaps, then, it is better to be conquered than to conquer, for the conquerer's soul is forfeit. Still, knowing what is better is not sufficient, for it is better that none would conquer at all.

[fishy-words]

Oh father, remember your lifetime obligations!

You must keep them from coming to harm

You must always remember

To keep them from danger

From malevolent forces

From slips of the tongue

[fishy-words]

Wrap it in sackcloth. Cover it with ashes. Douse it with pigs' blood. Desecrate it so that no one could ever love it, not even the one for whom it was made. Only then will it truly be yours.

[fishy-words]

Like the moon that hangs

In summer sky

Suspended in familiar time

Do I love you, oh my dear.

[fishy-words]

Fire burns inside me

Smoke collects above

Rolling as the wind blows

To meet my only love

Fire burns beneath me

Smoke fills up the sky

Hoping for a new day

As too, so once, did I

Fire burns around me

Smoke blots out the light

Soon the final sunset

Will burn into the night

[fishy-words]

He failed to change the world, so he made his own instead.

[fishy-words]

In the days of the divine court, when the goddesses and gods had found peace with their servants, and nations toiled in the sunlight to gather the day's harvest, a young girl named Sylvia stood at the edge of the lake of truth.

She'd heard the stories. She knew that to gaze into the lake was to become a god. And she knew that if anyone were to deserve godhood, it would be herself. So she left her home, traveling across the ancient forests and barren wastes that surrounded her homeland, gathering food where she could find it and going without when she could not, until she reached the place the legends spoke of, where scrolls of long-dead wanderers surrounded a wide and deep pond of the clearest water Sylvia had ever seen.

And so she looked. She looked into the pool for hours, waiting for something within her to change, peering into the void beneath the surface, but all she saw was her reflection.

The storytellers say that a god's domain is that which they claim as their greatest love. It is the thing they understand most deeply, the thing they value most highly, that for which they would lay their life down at the altar in an instant. When a god ascends, they are granted sight of their love. They gain an understanding purer than molten silver, they gain vision clearer than the summer sky. The storytellers say that a god is created when love is bound to truth.

Sylvia looked again into the waters of truth, and saw herself reflected. And Sylvia, the goddess of wanderers, began the long journey home.

[fishy-words]

I worked in Florida for a summer, up in the panhandle. It was at just the right spot that you could wake up in one time zone and go to work in another. The drive was long, but my sedan had decent enough mileage to make it affordable, and it was peaceful, but the scenery took some getting used to. The roads were carved out of the forest, so a thick line of trees lined either side for most of the drive. But most strange was the fact that every day, I saw an abandoned car pulled off of the one-lane highway I drove on the way back from work.

It was a different car every day, and every day, it was gone by the time I returned. I asked my landlord how they got there, but she dodged the question and tried to get me to take care of some kittens. Which I did, obviously. But still, the cars kept appearing and disappearing, as if to taunt me. I am not a superstitious man, but I do like to understand things. So, one night, I set up a camera to watch the highway. I hid it in the dense canopy, connected it to a live feed, and slept well, with the confidence of an undergraduate philosopher writing a new theory of mind.

When I woke up the next day, the live feed was cut off. I didn't have time to look through the records before heading to work, but I resolved to dig through them after I got back home.

I didn't need to, in the end. Following the northbound road home, I caught a glimpse of something suspended in the canopy. A car, hung sideways in a dense grouping of trees, in the same spot where my camera had been. It was a red sedan, like new, the door to its hatchback trunk hanging out towards the road. The license plate number was the same as mine.

I moved back to Arizona as soon as I could.

[fishy-words]

I'll tell you stories if you tell me some, too. They don't have to be true, they just have to be yours.

[fishy-words]

There are, generally, only two reasons that a person might be happy to hear that tomorrow is their execution day.

The first is that the person wishes to be executed - they may consider themselves a martyr, or believe that they deserve it, or may simple hope for the tense and abrupt release of death.

The second, more curious, reason, is that the person knows they will not be executed tomorrow, and will not, in fact, be executed at all.

[fishy-words]

“That seems unfair.” “Well, the world is cruel.” “I’m starting to think that maybe it’s just you that’s cruel.”

[fishy-words]

Morning brought with it a briny fog, and a pungent air of spoiled fish. Sarah woke up, wrestling herself from the warm embrace of her bed as she had so many times, and drove to San Francisco, for the last time.

Halfway across the bay bridge, traffic came to an abrupt and total halt. Radio stations professed to unseen accidents near the city, and the smell of smoke wafted through the waking breeze. Sarah stepped out of her car, and started running for the city.

The smoke grew thicker, working its way into her lungs. As she dashed past rendered metal and fire, she saw terrified drivers staring at the shoreline, waiting for the inevitable break in the tenuous peace of sunrise. The fog burned off, slowly, just enough for her to see it. She stumbled, and stopped, and stared.

Before her, a mass of rancid algae and rotted, silvery flesh buried the ground beyond the bridge. It stretched past the financial district, out to the wharfs, back further than she could make out. Sarah saw man-sized barnacles, tenacious and unrelenting, clinging to the sides of forty-story towers, pulling them towards the earth. At the bridgehead, workmen with flamethrowers held back the expanse of the mass to the best of their ability. She ran past them. They did not object.

The mass was deeper than Sarah expected, rising to her knees when she first set foot on land. It parted without much resistance as she waded through, and once she passed, stitched itself together with intent. She could feel something not entirely unlike a heartbeat running through its immaterial veins. She could not stop. She had to be sure.

She reached the university in less than an hour. The mass had risen past her waist, and the city had been abandoned, or, in some places, subsumed. She tore through it and climbed to her office on the second floor. The artifact was there. It was alive. It was bleeding.

Her office overlooked the Interior Greenbelt, whose foliage was losing ground to the mass as it crawled further from the sea. Sarah took a breath, her hands trembling, the air still for just a moment. She was holding the artifact now, once a polished black pearl, now a growing seed, taking root into the earth below. She grasped it tightly, and lifted it into the air.

As a wall of flesh knocked down her door, and the final few trees toppled into the mass, Sarah finally stopped holding back a smile. Her teeth were perhaps just a bit too sharp, and her eyes were perhaps just a bit too red. She listened to her heartbeat, and she felt the heart of the mass beating in time with hers. The mass was at her shoulders now. And now, it was at her head. And now, Sarah was gone, and in her place stood a city reclaimed by the sea.