The Fish

"All
external
       marks of abuse are present on this
       defiant edifice—"

The Fish, Marianne Moore









Content Warning: 
Infrequent Sex References

Transcript

The Fish

Among the bookstacks in the library, He kissed the unofficial girlfriend. He couldn’t remember in which section of the bookstacks He had been when she surprised Him with her presence: the soft, sickened face, adorned in pigment, the fragrant cascade of hair. It was the touch of scent that He remembered most vividly. Different avenues of sensory experience bled and blended when He was with her. The bookstacks were arranged into corridors, every possible inch of those long shelves, lined, squeezed with hardbacks, paperbacks, pamphlets, tomes. Mostly hardbacks if He thought about it. The shelves of the bookstacks were not very far apart, the corridor through which the browser’s passage was made possible, barely allowed for two people two pass one another. He and the girlfriend found themselves thrust into one another’s mouths by claustrophobia. She touched His penis, which was not soft. She did not touch the penis itself, but the outline of it in the crotch of His yellow jeans. 

“Thank you very much,” He said, retreating from her mouth. Her hand withdrew. She had only touched Him in play, not earnestness. “I am now satisfied,” He concluded, and walked away, leaving the girlfriend alone in the bookstack.

He had come for a book, but she had made him forget what book that was. So, He walked away, being done for the day, purposing a direct return, back to the house, in the close. The close was close to the campus. Outgoing, He crossed the library threshold, exiting through the portal. The portal gates were no longer in place so it was possible to pass through them, whether going in or out, without waiting for them to diverge. He was concerned about this. He went to ask about the automated library portal gates, at the reception desk. An Indian student who was very concerned and upset about something took a long time to make his requests, ask his necessary questions, obtain what information he came for. The Indian student departed and the one available receptionist was finally free to deal with the one pale, flat-expressioned customer behind him. 

“Hello,” the receptionist said.

“Hello,” He said.    

“Can I help you?” the receptionist said.

“Possibly,” He said. “I’d like to ask you about the library gates”.

“The automated library portal gates?” the receptionist replied.

“Yes. Where are they?”

“Oh, we had to get rid of them,” the receptionist said. “Someone was impaled, cut; cut perfectly in half by them.”

“An accident?” He ventured, bright with interest and curiosity.

“Ostensibly,” the receptionist said.

Her curious customer smiled.

“Thank you,” He said. “I am satisfied.” And away He went.

He walked on His way back home. But not before He went into the lavatory, to check His face in the mirror. Waterdrops tinkled in the lavatory, dripping sounds twinkled like stars of sound. Pipes muttered and groaned with the exertion of a recent flush. Bubbles bubbled. Peering closely at Himself over the sink, He observed the faintest suggestion above and around His lips of the girlfriend’s lips. The red remnants of tongue, lips, salivation, not of lipstick. He took water on his finger and rubbed away her redness. One of the doors behind Him opened and an exceedingly thin man emerged from the cubicle in which he had recently been not evacuating his bowels but eating lunch.

“I eat my lunch in the toilets,” said this man. “I’m too shy to eat it anywhere else. What if somebody talked to me?”

A nod answered.

“Would you like some lunch?” this man said, holding something up.

A shake answered.

He, not the thin man but the one who had been washing His face and who had just been kissed and who had asked about the library gates at reception, left the campus behind. He strolled in odd, deadened contentment down the steep incline, grass and trees, of many not one species, bordering. He was fish-faced, His eyes glassy, His expression closer to that of a deep, mysterious, ultra-marine form of life than a land-dwelling human being. Notwithstanding, He swam through the breathing world, happy in it, correct in its skyish environment, like a fish in water. His house keys jangled in his pocket as he walked.

His flatblock, which called itself a house but was a flat not a house, stood on the side of the road, redbricked, perfectly in sight. But He fancied a drink first. He drifted, phantom-like, unseen, called up from deathly depths, across the threshold of The Angler. He asked for a glass of water at the bar.

“If you ain’t ordering booze you’ll have to go on the naughty step, in the naughty room,” the barmaid said. 

“Fine,” He answered, breathily, cordially. He was perfectly happy to do so.

The glass of greenish water appeared on the countertop.

“On the rocks please,” He said.

“No ice today. Global warming. It’s a scandal, mate,” she said.

“Not to worry,” He said.

The barmaid led Him and His glass of water to the naughty room, where the naughty step sat.

“Sit,” she said. He did. 

She closed the door behind Him, not locking it. The room was grey, featureless, stony, prison-like but for the unbolted door, and the naughty step was a blue beer barrel. He drank His water quickly and then returned the glass to the countertop of the bar. The barmaid noticed him and He said:

“Thank you very much. I am quite satisfied”.

It was raining softly when He got outside. A puddle formed at his feet. A thrum agitated it, like brontosaurus steps. But it was just the raindrops. In the puddle, ripples rayed out from the centre of each little disturbance. He liked the rain. It was His favourite kind of weather. There was a beggar wrapped in cling-film a few paces along from The Angler’s front steps. He was nude but shone eerily, like a merman, flashed like a fin in the light, because of the cling-film which tightly, even superlatively, clung to him. The beggar had, stuck, quite stubbornly, quite adhesively to his head, a dead squid of some description, like a blobby skull-cap. Opened like a flower and clasped, suckered to the beggar’s head, the dried, decaying tentacles had solidified in the air. The body of the squid drooped behind the frontal, face-like spectacle of his tentacle-legs. 

“Good morning,” the beggar said. “I am quite satisfied.”

“So am I,” He answered, He who had been kissed, asked about the automated library portal gates, had a water on the naughty step.

The rain stopped just as He reached the porch and found that the door was not where it used to be. He needn’t have retrieved his keys which had been loudly jangling in his pockets all day. He crossed the threshold with ease. He bumped into the girl whose name he couldn’t remember outside the kitchen. He bumped into her idiomatically, proverbially; not literally, that would have been unpleasant.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello, girl,” He replied. They both said nothing for a while. Until He broke their silence with: “Where is the door?”

“Oh, yes, we decided to get rid of it. It’s been misbehaving. It keeps closing.”

“Oh,” He replied.

“See you later then,” she said, concludingly. “Bye for a bit.”

She was already gone when He placidly said: “Bye,” baaing it, like a sheep left on his own in a field.

He went up to His room and discovered the surprise whose beholding would make the day memorable, though not the section of the library in which he had kissed the girlfriend. He didn’t immediately notice it, nor did he react. He took off His strange yellow jeans and revealed His legs. He sat in His spinning chair, and looked at His legs for a while. In one place a vein was blue, ovular. It looked a bit like a fish. Then he turned around and noticed, neatly laid, deposited somewhat artfully, curled a little upon the bare mattress where it slept: a large fish, excellently actual, gleaming, dripping there. It reeked, coldly, of salt and sea, but He wasn’t immediately aware of that as He only used His nose on special occasions: when the girlfriend was around for example. Those really were the best times, in His opinion. With the girlfriend, or on His own. In between those two states, there was nothing of very much value. The flesh of the fish was unmutilated, hardly a scale dislodged. The gills were still, the eyes wide open and poignant, the silver lipless lips of the mouth parted about a finger. A note, a baritonal O seemed to hum from the fish. It was deceased. He, not the fish though it was a he, the He who had been visited by this uninvited fish, ran his finger along the scales. The texture lit him up with laughter, a laughing pleasure. He noted that the fish was a soiled, dirty creamcolour on the underside, spotted and puckered with watery oranges and teals. The long tail-like body where scales, too many of them to count, beautifully glittered was royal silver-grey, and myrtle. The weird, ruffled webbing of its tail was perfectly black. The fish left behind a cold pool of briney fluid on the mattress, sheetless. He lifted up the fish carefully, in both of his hands, from the bed, carrying, elevating, bearing that cold body with great care, a body without width, only length, both slack and also taut to touch. He didn’t know what sort of a fish it was. He laid it in the sink, a bath of a kind. He went back to the bed. He buried his face in the fishy pool left behind in the mattress and drank the saltiness. 

He dialled the girlfriend’s number, which He had finally memorised. Such a memorisation indicated how much He cared for the girlfriend. He loved her. After three rings on the mobile, she answered. He recognised her answering voice with pleasure, made telephonic and a little irreal.

“Hello, girlfriend,” he said. “How are you?”

“Fine. I’m a little busy though. What is it?”

“There’s a fish on my bed.”

“What?”

“There’s a fish. On my bed. Well, it’s in the sink now.”

“And?”

“Would you like to come over and eat it with me?”

“Erm…” she trailed off. Her eyes turned to the boy beside her, in the library, among the bookstacks, seeking guidance from him. The boy made a sign of impatience and anger at her. “I can’t tonight actually. I’m busy.”

“Okay then. See you another time. Bye”.

“Bye.”

She terminated the call eagerly and returned to the boy.

He, not the girlfriend’s new lover whom she had found among the bookstacks, but the He alone in his room with a fish, rubbed his legs. He often had the suspicion that the girlfriend had found someone else among the bookstacks. He had always feared that she would. He took up the fish from the sink, in one hand this time. Its two ends flopped flaccidly and symmetrically down on either side of his hand. The fish made a shape like a sad face, made the very same downward curve as a frown, or a good-luck horseshoe the wrong way up.

He went downstairs and into the kitchen, carrying the fish. Two of the fellow flatters, though not the girl whose name He couldn’t remember, were drinking coffee. They giggled at His coming.

“Hello,” one of them said.

“Hello,” He answered.

Tittering, they saw immediately that he was carrying the fish.

“Enjoy your gift?” the other flatmate said, sniggering.

“I hope to,” He answered, not the flatmate, the He who had been kissed in the bookstacks and enquired at reception about the automated library portal gates and been offered lunch by the man in the toilet and had a water at The Angler and passed a beggar with a squid on his head and been gifted a fish on his mattress and been betrayed. “I’m not sure because I haven’t tasted it yet. But I probably will, yes.” He finished. He didn’t thank them. 

He knew how to gut it, bone it, cut it into strips, and He did. He fried the strips in oil, in a frying pan. He ate them with rice. 

When He’d eaten the fish, that which was edible, he tried to resurrect it, some resembling suggestion of it, some etching of its form. He had thrown away none of the bones and attempted to arrange them into some kind of a skeletal semblance of the creature whose sea-absorbing softness he had consumed, whose unbulbous cheeks long as legs He had fried in oil and plated with rice, who had been so very alive once upon a time, perhaps red with the kisses of a lady fish, who once had swam and swam, at fathoms like dreams, in spooky waters the colour of night. He moulded a recognisable thing, on the kitchen table, from the strangely sacred vertebrae, the delicate ribs. He ran His fingers, as deftly as he dared, along the patterned, ribbed, tenderly constructed creature He just had eaten unentirely. The triangular slice of the face was still there but the eyes had closed, the lids had quite simply dropped shut, like a vertical prison door, with the sad weariness of another ended day. The tail, its black black fan, also remained.