“Me too,” I said. But it wasn’t true.
Of course they hit it off, and before long he’d moved into the apartment and they were talking about getting married. I was wicked pissed about it at first, but it turned out that Lloyd was, if nothing else, a totally smart dude. He caught me reading a bio-chem text one night, and I was all embarrassed, but he acted like it was totally normal. Turns out he was a bio-researcher and professor at UIC-UC, a real egghead, and he was as obsessed with plug-in mods as I was. He studied the plug-ins, and people with them, even though he could get fired from the college for it. He’d lean over my books in our library, helping me study for the GED test or just teaching me about things I always wanted to understand but never thought I could. Like he explained not only the mechanics of how the cats were able to fly, but how the retro-gene worked on their DNA and how the changes were passed along to their kittens. I just listened, most of it going over my head faster than a flying cheetah. I knew once I had my plug-ins everything he said would make sense. But the thing that got me was that he didn’t have any mods at all. Not even a plug-in.
Actually, he really hated the plug-ins, and I think he even hated the people who had ‘em. He said they were dangerous, and that only people who were selfish and lazy and—I had to look this one up—callow would use such a thing. I thought it was easy for him to say; he was smart without ‘em.
He also hated drugs, especially the new ones like the ones I sold. One time, he went off on this lecture about drugs while I was on drugs, and it looked to me like his head was getting bigger and bigger as he talked, and I thought about him just floating up until he hit the ceiling, and it was the funniest thing ever at the time. So, you know, I never introduced him to my friends. But then I wasn’t seeing much of them anyway. I hadn’t even told ’em about our new digs.
Mom smiled a lot, for a while. Over time, though, I could see that faraway look creeping into her expressions, and I knew it was only a matter of time before she came to me again.
When she did, I knew right away what she wanted. On the dining room table sat a glass box maybe three feet long by two wide by two tall. I’d only seen one once, at one of the posh monolith parties. It was an aquarium.
#
It was winter, and every time I lost my footing on an icy street I hoped I’d drop the tank and it would break and I’d be off the hook. I didn’t though. And it was just as well; I knew she wouldn’t let it rest at that anyway.
The lake was frozen in the shallows, so I walked out past the cribs, sliding the aquarium along the bumpy ice. It had been stormy when the water froze.
When I’d gotten as far as I dared, I called for the goldfish.
It took a really long time before he appeared, popping his head out of a hole in the ice off to my right. I wore a scarf and a hat, but no gloves, and my fingers were freezing. “Hey kid,” he said. “Come to shoot the current?”
I smiled and walked over to where he’d surfaced. I knelt down to give him a high-five. The cold water on my hand made it feel even colder; for a moment I was worried my hand would freeze to his delicate fin like a tongue to a lamppost. “How’s it going, fish-dude?”
“Okay,” he said, then he saw the aquarium behind me on the ice. When he spoke again his voice was lower. “What does your mom want now?”
I glanced back at the tank too, and knew that the fun part of this meeting was over. “She wants you.”
The fish ducked under the water quickly, then came back up. “What do you mean, ‘she wants me’?”
It would have been easy to walk away then, to shrug it all off and go back to the penthouse. But I realized then that I didn’t want to go home alone. So I lied. “She’s so grateful for everything you’ve done for us that she wants you to live with us. You know, so you don’t freeze out here.”
“Is that all?” he asked. A cold wind gusted, shaking me as I crouched on the ice. The fish looked at me first with his left eye, then with his right, just like he’d done when we met.
“I’d like you to come too,” I said. I could hear my voice shake, but I wasn’t sure it was from the cold. “You’re my best friend.” It was true.
The goldfish disappeared under the ice, then surfaced in a different hole, nearer to the tank. When he returned he asked, “And that’s all you two want from me? Your motives — and your mother’s — are pure?”
There was probably a part of my mom that felt the way I’d said. She was grateful, and sometimes even said so, praising the fish as the miracle that he was. But her motive for wanting him was about as pure as the snow on downtown streets.
It took me a while, but eventually I said, “Yes.”
The fish looked at me for a long time, evaluating. “I thought you cared about me,” he said. He dove down again, and when I saw him again he was much farther out into the lake.
I stood and shouted, “Come back! I do care!” I moved forward a few steps on the ice, terrified that I would fall through.
“No worries,” the fish said bitterly. “Go back to your home. It’ll be as you deserve.” He jumped out of the water and made a gesture with his tail in the air that I was pretty sure I understood.
“Please!” I yelled.
The fish jumped again, and there was a shadow across the air, and a flash of orange that had nothing to do with shiny scales.
It wasn’t quick, and it wasn’t funny.
The flying tiger was a mass of orange and black fur, twitching and hungry and shockingly physical, wings cutting through the air powerfully yet almost silently. It pounced while the fish was still in the air, but instead of catching him cleanly and hoisting him into the air like the dog, the goldfish was knocked across the ice, skipping like a stone. I could see him flopping and thrashing, looking for a hole to get back underwater. I took two quick steps forward before I felt the ice cracking and stopped myself.
The tiger’s paws barely touched the ice before it leapt, swatting the goldfish across the ice again, closer to shore and to me. Pale fish blood splattered and froze.
The goldfish was screaming, but if the tiger thought anything of it, I couldn’t tell. Between the shrieks of terror were words, entreaties. “Please!” he yelled, “Let me go; I’ll give you anything you want!”
But you can’t reason with a tiger. The cat batted the goldfish around until the screams died down and I thought with relief that the fish had finally died. Then the tiger started to eat its prey, and the goldfish made a noise of such anguish that I will never stop hearing it. The wail echoed off the surface of the lake as if reluctant to leave. And then it was truly quiet, save the muted crunching of fish bones. When it was done the tiger looked at me, pink tongue licking its face, and it was only then that I felt the freezing tears on my own face, and remembered to be afraid.
As I started to run the tiger flew up into the air, and it was so fast that I knew it would catch me no matter what I did. So I turned around to see.
I watched the tiger alight as gently as a feather on the top of the nearer water crib, fold its wings down onto its back, and disappear inside the ancient tower.
#
I don’t know why I carried the aquarium away from the lake with me. In fact, I didn’t even really know I’d done it until I found myself on the street in front of the monolith we lived in, staring stupidly up at the towering building.
I hadn’t expected the penthouse to be there when I got off the elevator. I thought I’d find somebody else’s home, or an empty ruin. It was all I deserved.
I have the aquarium to this day; it’s one of many similar tanks in my corner of the lab. But that one remains empty. I’ve learned much about the variations of DNA, in the phylum Chordata and elsewhere in the animal kingdom, much more than I ever thought my unplugged brain and its unboosted synapses could comprehend. I’ve tested the boundaries of a fish’s brain and a fish’s power. I’ve made goldfish that walked on land, goldfish that warbled like canaries, goldfish with knowing looks in their dark eyes.
But
I have yet to make a goldfish who will understand my apology.
***published in Ideomancer, Volume 10 Issue 1, March 2011
Story notes:
This story was written during my second week at Clarion West (yes, that place again—it’s incredible and I recommend it to all aspiring writers of speculative fiction). It remains one of my favorite stories.
It’s a retelling of the folk tale, “The Magic Fish,” with some very major differences. In the original fable both the fisherman and his greedy wife are punished for asking too much, a rather straightforward morality tale. I was planning to follow that storyline in my version, until I became stuck writing the ending. After sitting up most of the night fretting about my impending deadline, I decided to write a totally unfair ending, in which the one truly innocent character is punished. Interestingly, my protagonist learned a deeper lesson from his Pyrrhic victory than he ever could have from a just outcome.
The setting of this piece was inspired by my long-standing fascination with apocalypses large and small, my time at Roosevelt University in Chicago, and my desire for flying tigers and meat trees. Somebody needs to get cracking on those.
acknowledgements
TK
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Fairwood Press is an independent small press specializing in speculative fiction created in 2000. It has published nearly 100 titles since then, including story collections, novels, anthologies, and specialty items. Fairwood Press is owned and edited by Patrick Swenson.
Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas Page 27
