Fish Do Not Howl (a work in progress)
Fish do not howl, and it’s a fucking shame. Often times I will breach the surface of the water and fixate my gaze upon the glorious full moon. I love the moon with all of my being. I love not what just the moon does to me, but I love everything else about it as well. I love its near side, I love its far side, and I love its vast solidified pools of ancient basaltic lava. Gratitude overwhelms me when I have even a single thought of the moon, but staring at its full light brings about such an emotion more than tenfold. And in this moment, with my tiny eyes locked in full admiration with its natural light, all I want to do is howl. My thoughts will yell, they will scream in glory, they will long to praise the moon, but nothing comes out. People do not like the moon, I hear. Sometimes you’ll overhear two intellectuals in a coffeehouse, or two farmers at a feed store, or two kids on a jungle gym and one of them will tell the other just how useless they find the moon to be.
“Why did we even WANT to go there?” one of them will say.
I want to go there, I want to live there, and I want to howl. Some day, it might even have already happened, but some day someone might be walking along the water and find a goldfish with its head breaching the water and its eyes wide, wider than they normally are, wide with desperation, and its tiny fish lips moving about as if to incite some odd and ancient incantation.
“What is that fish trying to do?” they might ask themselves.
Howl. That fish is trying to howl at the moon. In fact, it’s the first thing I tried to do during my very first legitimate swim, once I had worked out all of the logistics. The logistics of it all, actually, are a source of personal shame. I had a problem, and the solution was quite simple, but it took far too long for me to think of it. One of the more stupid moments of my life was a time when I was standing in my room, naked, with fish bowls at my feet, surrounding me in a circle. In preparation for the next full moon, I made attempts at contorting my body at certain angles so that once I changed I would fall directly into a fish bowl. Luckily I realized how I stupid I had been before the next full moon occurred and I did not spend my final moments flapping my gills about desperately, dying on my apartment floor in the center of a circle of a fish bowls. If that had happened, I still do not know what manner of corpse would have been discovered lying on my floor. The idea that I should be standing in water and let gravity do its work was a stroke of genius that saved my life. The notion I had at the time was that I would transform and fall towards the earth as a goldfish, but it’s more likely that I shrink down to the floor as I change. I know far too little about my own condition,
“Why did we even WANT to go there?” one of them will say.
I want to go there, I want to live there, and I want to howl. Some day, it might even have already happened, but some day someone might be walking along the water and find a goldfish with its head breaching the water and its eyes wide, wider than they normally are, wide with desperation, and its tiny fish lips moving about as if to incite some odd and ancient incantation.
“What is that fish trying to do?” they might ask themselves.
Howl. That fish is trying to howl at the moon. In fact, it’s the first thing I tried to do during my very first legitimate swim, once I had worked out all of the logistics. The logistics of it all, actually, are a source of personal shame. I had a problem, and the solution was quite simple, but it took far too long for me to think of it. One of the more stupid moments of my life was a time when I was standing in my room, naked, with fish bowls at my feet, surrounding me in a circle. In preparation for the next full moon, I made attempts at contorting my body at certain angles so that once I changed I would fall directly into a fish bowl. Luckily I realized how I stupid I had been before the next full moon occurred and I did not spend my final moments flapping my gills about desperately, dying on my apartment floor in the center of a circle of a fish bowls. If that had happened, I still do not know what manner of corpse would have been discovered lying on my floor. The idea that I should be standing in water and let gravity do its work was a stroke of genius that saved my life. The notion I had at the time was that I would transform and fall towards the earth as a goldfish, but it’s more likely that I shrink down to the floor as I change. I know far too little about my own condition,