fish dreams

Apartment half full of half-full boxes. My bones feel out of place. Writing won't help me sleep tonight. The boxes have other people's interests on them. Petco. A George Foreman three-in-one combo (grill, ten-cup coffee maker, shower radio. All translucent aqua blue.) A picture of an office chair. (Not so interesting.) Moving won't help this headache. In fact, it makes it worse. A pretty turn of phrase, a magic charm to help me sleep. I packed those already.

Begin again. The way my foot looks when it's half in and half out of the lake, half deadpale and half lifelike. Starry sky half-covered with cloudbank. Glass of wine half full, full, full. Not interesting enough.

Begin again. Annie's half-heart locket. Halfhearted applause. (Maybe I have a rib out of place. I twist my trunk. No good.)

Begin. Half-moon reflected, the long white moon-path I'd swim along were I not so afraid of what's below it. Half-dead underwater skin, half-goosebumped, half-puckered. The other day I wrote a lie I hate to re-read (wait, I'll go get it):

Lie #2: I love eating live fish from fishtanks. I love the
way they flip around in my mouth, and the way they go
limp when I bite down. I keep the limp body in my
mouth for a second before I swallow. It makes me feel
powerful.

Sometimes, half-awake in grey morning light, I imagine there are dead goldfish in my bed, near my feet. It's all I can do not to flail away from them. This has happened more than once.

Larger dead fish don't bother me so much.

Again. No closer to sleeping. No closer to anything, except I just finished my water. I drink bottled water. You're not supposed to do that anymore.

Begin again. Should I be numbering this? Would that make it easier to read? Would that make anything easier?

I remember a dead fish on a lakerock. I didn't know what it was at first, and I asked my grandmother to get it for me. She was visiting. I don't remember what happened then. She didn't pick it up or anything. No screaming. Somehow we discovered it was a fish. It was shiny silver. It was on its side. Strange, the things you never forget.

Also the fish in our fishtank, having babies one morning before church, right after Dad got the new car. All the babies swimming around, and then we realized that the mother was eating them. Mom put a glass pitcher over the mother, to keep her from eating her children. But they died anyway. I don't have that picture in my mind, thank God. Just of them swimming around, big-eyed, and the mother gulping them up, which is bad enough.

Now I'll probably have those fish-dreams again.

If I ever fall asleep.

These days, I don't close my eyes in the shower for long. But I used to sometimes imagine fish floating around my ankles in the backed-up water. I haven't thought about that in a long time.

I hate fishtanks, but love aquariums. At the Boston Aquarium I saw a school of silver fish, moving fast, all in the same direction, except for one that was dead. The body was sort of moving in the same direction, but not really keeping up. Its eye was wide and staring, but then all the live ones' eyes were too. (I wrote it's and changed it. Maybe I am getting tired.) I didn't mind that dead fish, but I still remember it.

I can hear the trashtruck picking up the dumpster in the street below our apartment. It picks it up and shakes it into itself, and there's the sound of glass breaking. I bet it smells like fish. Dead fish. That's what they usually smell like.

I had a scratch-n-sniff sticker that ostensibly smelled like dead fish. On it was a picture of a trashcan with a limp fish on top, with an x for an eye. The dead Boston Aquarium fish did not have an x for an eye.

In college my next-door neighbor had one leg. (This detail is not an integral part of the recollection.) He was very good at skiing. Skiing and banging on girls' doors in the middle of the night, demanding to be let in. He never banged on my door, though. (That's not integral to the story either.) He was going away on a skiing trip and he had a fishtank (oh ho! she gets to the point) and he asked if he could leave the fishtank in my room while he went away on his trip. He promised that he would take me skiing later in the winter if I fishsat for him. Reluctantly, I said okay (this long recollection is breaking whatever form I had established for this piece. Nevertheless.) I remember him standing next to my dorm room window, after having put his fishtank on the windowsill. He moved slightly awkwardly, but was really barely hampered by only having the one leg. He was pouring water into the tank and I was looking on with dread, and I finally said, "I can't do it. I hate fish." It was awkward, but I knew I couldn't handle it, a weekend with fish in my room.

Begin again. Still about fish -- I also don't mind when the lake fish bite my toes. It's startling, but okay. I kick at them, and they go away. They have hard mouth ridges, not differentiated teeth. At least, that's what it feels like. I assume that to be true.

I assume a lot of things to be true that may not actually be true. Perhaps that's one of my faults. Or strengths.

I have a bag of frozen shrimp in the freezer. We have eaten almost everything in the apartment, in preparation for moving. But the bag of shrimp is still there. It's been there for a long time, because the last time I thawed some of those shrimp bodies and ate them I realized how similar to fish bodies they were. "Come on," L said, "don't do that to yourself. You love shrimps." I do. But the fact remains, they are little dead fish bodies. Not quite as slippery as goldfish, at least. I think it would actually be better if they were the peel-and-eat kind, with legs on. Peeling them would distract me, I think. Now, that is odd. Why do I make these distinctions?

This makes me sound like I am obsessed with fish. But really I only think about them once in a while. They're on my mind because I just read a passage in a book about a girl's fish dying when someone unplugged their tank overnight. The girl and her father flushed the fish down the toilet. That is not what we did in our family. Our plumbing was too unreliable, so we buried our fish in margarine containers.

Begin again. I am beginning to wonder if this will ever come to a natural end. I am beginning to think I will have to end it abruptly. But perhaps some better images to end with? Something to keep me from thinking about fish when I try to sleep again?

What is the opposite of dead fish? Polar bears? NO! Bears eat fish. Iowa? Yes, that. Somewhere as far away from water as possible. Wide plains-n-prairies. Buffalo with their shaggy dusty coats and formidable horns.

Packing boxes half-full of not-fish. (Ah, symmetry.) Eyes heavy-lidded, mind clear of fish, mind full of tumbleweeds that bounce along a dusty, deserted street, leaving no trails.