Prophet Fish
Daniel
Laura was standing there, under raining snow. The plane was taking off just above her head. The wind was rushing high. Her legs were planted firm beneath her, thick blurry stalks on the black asphalt runway. Some brown hair escaped her ponytail and danced above her head in a crown of flames. Behind her, the cornfield laughed and whispered into ears and faces. Some of them nodded their golden heads, greeted her gasping form, hushed her face too open. Laura was smiling, Laura was shouting. For Daniel, though, her voice was getting lost beneath the surface of noise. He knew she was yelling, because he could see the vein rise round on the side of her neck. But he couldn't make out anything she was saying, it was all skimming and slipping under his ears, just grazing the backs of his shoulders and falling at his ankles. Dark sparks already forgotten. He laughed suddenly at this spray, at this Laura who was spitting glimmers at him; he hooted and yelped and then he felt a gold metal band tighten around his heart. His head felt dizzy and pressed inwards by the burning blue air. So this is the newfound freedom, a voice within him murmured. For a moment, he thought he saw white feathers shooting towards him from behind Laura's shoulders. No, no, that was a trick of the light. Laura, Laura come here, he sputtered and beamed. He stood on the side of the runway. She was too far to hear. The cornfield chorused behind him: Laura, Laura come near! Laura, Laura I fear! Laura, Laura! But she was still standing there, centered on the long black tongue of the god. Noise settled around his ankles, then drained and washed away as the dim steel plane drew it from them. The plane grew smaller and higher in the sky behind her head. Its gray condensed to white, and then to pearl. It dangled hooked upon the sky. An earring; and then it was a tooth poked through and it poised above Laura's left ear. Daniel thought of the dogs. He pictured their canine teeth, their pointed ivory spears that laced across the mouth and quivered around his knees. Shit, he was slipping to the dogs now. If he didn't watch himself, they'd eat him in his dreams. He'd woken up white-hot and sweaty dozens of times over the last ten years, twisted in his springy broken cot, knowing just what those dogs wanted. They wanted him backed up against the concrete walls. They wanted his final execution. In dreams, the concrete was a gray so dark, it was a bruised purple. His back felt insubstantial against it, pressured; his whole body felt more like a blister waiting to burst the second he pressed too hard against the concrete, or grazed a knuckle on the tooth of one of those dogs. Goddamn it, those dogs could smell the insides of him, and their eyes always looked right through his tired skin to his ticking bones. But the dogs were kind tonight and they pulled him back to Laura. Except, this time she was a memory. She wasn't under the hot blue sky. She was on the other side of thick glass. She put her hand up on the barrier; Daniel did the same. It was cold between them and concrete all around. He was remembering how it had always been between them, in those years, when she would come to visit him. She would speak to him from the other side of the glass, but he only saw the movement of her lips. She made round O's over and over. Sometimes, it occurred to him that she looked like a fish in the county aquarium, a ridiculous kind of fish with scaled seashell lips and slowly closing eyes, with a face that hovered eternally at the edge of the glass. When he came forward to her face, she spun an ancient language to him. In this place, she spoke with no noise and blew her silent spells at him. The pinkish sheen her face gave off was smuggled sunlight, and there was silver reflected off her side, silver banded rings. But he felt he wanted none of these things. He came to draw her wisdom and then, refused by the cold of the glass, he backed off. But she still stayed there, looking out at him with those big glossy eyes. What more did she want from him? How inhuman it felt between them, how something felt slipped from the stare and horribly askew. He wanted to tell her to speak through the hole in the glass. She never listened. Flat orange men formed their dull and tattered audience: he wanted so badly to protect her from the condemned. They floated by in their mechanical schools and their empty saddened bodies, eyes hanging downwards, loose and bright. Indifferent demi-gods, these vacant men. In those days, if Daniel stayed backed away from the glass long enough, Laura would finally leave. But she'd go with tears in her eyes that looked to him like scales sifting downwards. Yes, she was something slowly unscaling. But he always felt release when she left, he felt done with her and all the silver-heavy land she pulled beneath. She was not like him. It couldn't be so; she was no real fish. Trick of the mind. He returned to the bottom, rested weightless, poised delicate. He never understood what she wanted from him, what she thought she could get why she left him here when she came to see him drifting rootless here inside the tank.
Laura
If you take the main road out beyond the edges of town, you end up in the cornfields. The cornfields are where children in Wyanet grow up together, play maze, hunt each other among the heavy upright stalks, and weave gasping in and out of standing trunks. The cornstalks stand like leaden men and women. What solemn social beasts they are, what strength of earth they have. But the children take pleasure in dodging them, in their natural prejudice, as they pass through the weighted bodies they know they never will be. The cornfields are also the space lying between Wyanet and its prison. If you continue through the fields, you will find yourself standing at the place where everything bumps, sudden, up against the prison's concrete side. The cornstalks sigh at this crush of outer limits. And you: you know that if you've taken the road this far already, then this is the end you've intended to reach. You know what kind of men stand inside those walls, and you know how they are planted firm but swaying limply in the inward rocking fluid of their many vicious crimes. You know which faces you will pass to get to one single broad face, one familiar set of shoulders. But you will not touch the shoulders, or the singular face, because to keep the men and their errant briny water inside, the glass tank has to be thick, and cold, and ungenerous with its holes. Stand at the hole through which you are meant to speak, but don't give away the error that you smuggle. If the man you chose, or the face you once kissed as a child, turns up wavering indefinitely as a weed within the tank, you must become a different kind of beast. Rise up: you are ancient and eternal. You were formed before his time. Lose your sense of touch, now, and force yourself from your legs. Uproot the stalks you thought, as a child, you'd never even have. And shed your breathing skin, slide upon your scales. Don't graze the doors on the way in. Never speak through the hole, or you shall give away your human lie. And always, always remember this: you have no water of your own. His water cannot be yours, although you seek its numbing pity. Inside, it cradles the face that you once chose. But the cornfields are sucked dry now. Either you will have to live impossible on air; or you will have to find some ancient way to make the gods endorse your plight. Look at all that you conduct, look at all that you have caused. This is how you shall become a prophet fish.
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