Fish Head
It was hardly worthy of remark that he’d been born with
the head of a fish. His condition, if you could call it that, wasn’t terribly
different he imagined from coming into the world deaf. From the first day you
didn’t know anything but a lack of sound. Only by other people’s reactions did
you begin to be aware that you were categorized as rare. You wouldn’t
necessarily have thought of a fish head as a defect until somebody pointed out
that it was, making fun of you or simply stopping to stare as if you were a
spectacle on display in a museum of taxidermy.
Sporting a fish head had its advantages. An early girlfriend
had been attracted because of his blubbery lips and told him he was a great
kisser. Another liked the attention she got when he and she went out dancing,
how every human head would turn, and somehow, she managed to convince herself
that it was her beauty, rather than his goggle eyes, which fascinated
passersby. Still another girl just liked fish. She had an aquarium with a
miniature treasure chest inside, wavy plants and was always testing the Ph of the
water so it wouldn’t get out of balance. In the end he did turn out to be a
temporary novelty for these females. They left Walter as easily as they’d taken
him up. He joked to himself about it calling their behavior “catch and
release.” His friends got the reference and laughed alongside, but something
about the phrase made them nervous.
Some of his buddies liked to hang around him to show that
they weren’t prejudiced. In their minds, they had “street” if they got seen in
the company of Walter, taking a puff of the same cigarette that he’d been
smoking, to prove that they weren’t grossed out by his wet mouth. To be sure
there were social disadvantages. A group of guys at school started shouting out
“Mackerel!” in disparaging voices as he passed. He couldn’t figure out why
they’d settled on that variety of fish, given that it was commercially
successful. Their town had a profitable
mackerel cannery that employed many of the parents, and mackerel was said to
have a mild and pleasant flavor. Not that Walter had tasted it, because that
might be cannibalism.
For health reasons he was vegan, so anything with a face was
off the list. It did weird him out to watch anybody eating seafood, though he
tried not to let on. He would get choked up and pretend into his napkin that he
was suffering from seasonal allergies. Friends in his clique would hesitate at
a restaurant before choosing fish and chips or fried catfish off the menu. They
would end up changing their minds, even when he tried to reassure them that he
was not related to those species. In truth, he didn’t really know his
parentage.
Walter had been raised by a minister and his wife, who had
adopted him from an orphanage. They were kind, but they made it clear they
didn’t want to talk about his past and he never got the courage to investigate
the matter on his own, as they might have perceived his initiative as a
betrayal. They said he was their son, they loved him, and they didn’t
understand why he was concerned about his origins. “You’re just like us, because
we raised you,” they insisted and were proud to have him squeezed between them
in the Christmas photo, almost defiantly sending that picture out to friends
and implicitly daring them to raise any issues about him being different. Without
a doubt, those friends talked among themselves, but no one at church or in
their circle was brave enough to point to his difference from everybody else. In
fact, he sang in the choir. To put everyone at ease, he made an awkward joke
about singing bass, but that didn’t go over because bass was only an eye rhyme.
Also, because he was a high tenor.
Despite Google, Walter hadn’t been able to determine his
species. Even if he were in fact a bass, would he be large mouth, small mouth,
spotted, or striped? Then again, the shape of his face seemed more like a blue
gill’s—unless it was a bream’s. His markings and features were ambiguous. He
could really argue it in any direction, from day to day. It was a shame facial
recognition software hadn’t yet developed to the stage that you could take a
picture of your head and a database in some department of zoology would provide
an instant match, or at least percentages of probability. His phenotype and
traits didn’t point to anything obvious or specific. Rather, his head looked
like an amalgamation of different species, like a child’s idea of a fish drawn
with crayon except with a human body. A head alone wasn’t enough to conclude
with even remote accuracy. Perhaps if his whole body had been that of a fish,
he’d have had enough to go on. Then again, if he were all fish, he wouldn’t
have this problem in the first place. He’d have been swimming with his school
in some lake or other, acting instinctively and experiencing low level
thoughts, mostly about food and sheltering from predators.
At school, he sensed a protective bubble formed by his
teachers and the principal, as though the matter had been discussed at the
faculty lounge, possibly as a handicap needing protected status. Or an
endangered species. A sense of threat remained ever present, minimally
represented by his being called mackerel. On the faces of those boys, he could
see that if they’d had their way, they’d catch him unawares behind the school
and beat him, maybe even decapitate him if they’d been able to give absolute
free rein to their hostile desires.
Then the inevitable happened. A car pulled to the curb on a
side street one day, when he was walking home from his part time job at the car
wash. It was a shortcut he never had dared to take, but he was simply tired
that day from buffing all the cars in the autumn chill and wanted to be home
nursing a hot herbal tea. Four guys piled out, ones he recognized from their
matching cage-fighter buzz-cuts but barely knew. With practiced speed, they
stuffed him in the trunk of the car, closed it, and sped off. Too late, he
realized that they’d gone through the auto-wash not long before to scope him
out and be sure he was at work.
Consumed with abject terror, he focused on not peeing his
pants. He’d been too lazy to relieve himself in the car wash’s grimy, tiny
employee bathroom before clocking out. Walter listened to the car’s tires
traverse regular highway pavement, clearly going out of town, as they didn’t
slow for any stoplights. Then the vehicle went off the pavement along a bumpy
road, seemingly gravel. When the trunk opened, he saw branches overhanging and
green light filtering through. The boys had the smug smiles of somebody who can
kill you or not, as they please. One was holding a big knife, as if he were
going to decapitate Walter or fillet him, but then another said, “Put that in
the car, don’t be an idiot,” and the knife-wielder complied. They marched their
prisoner to the edge of the town reservoir by the city which was stocked with
fish, such as trout and bass. For a modest fee you could fish, and when Walter
had come out here once to make out with the girl who liked his lips, he’d seen
old guys casting from the shore. At that moment, there was no one else in
sight, unfortunately.
“Go back to your own kind,” commanded the one who was
clearly a ringleader. He had a weird
growth on the side of his nose that easily could have been fixed through
cosmetic surgery. But his parents
probably thought that having a wart or tumor on his face made him look more
masculine. Walter knew his parents would have taken care of such a detail if
that had happened to him.
“I don’t know what my own kind are,” Walter observed. “There
are six or eight different varieties in this lake alone, and it’s a crapshoot
as to whether I belong to any of them. I doubt it. I’m more like a mestizo.”
The ringleader cuffed him. “Don’t be smart. I mean they’re
fish. They all look the same.”
“They don’t. Have you ever examined them closely?”
“No, because they’re not my relatives.”
“Each type has
different colored scales and gills. Their fins have dissimilar shapes. Some
types of fish are several times as large as the others.”
“You should be on the Nature Channel as a host, dude,”
offered one of the malevolent foursome with what seemed genuine enthusiasm. “That
would be cool. They could call it Fish on Fish.”
“Listen, asshole. You’re a freak show. It makes me sick to
see you walking down the hall with your arm around a girl. You disgust me. I
think about you making a baby on one of them and I almost lose my mind.”
“I’m pretty sure a fish head is a recessive gene,” offered
Walter, improvising, as if to mitigate the situation.
“I don’t care. You’re a mutant, like that guy in The Fly.
They should have killed you at birth.”
“Come on, Trey. That’s harsh.”
“Shut up, Beaver. Or you’ll be riding in the trunk on the
way back. Now, Fish Boy, get in the lake and swim to your ancestors.”
Ironically, Walter didn’t know how to swim. He’d asked his
parents to give him lessons, but they were funny about it, not wanting to lump
him in the category of swimmers. That skill would have made him more like his
birth parent. In truth, he had a hunch that he could have excelled on the swim
team, probably been a star, unless rival schools made an issue of his head implying
he had an unfair advantage. At bottom, apart from seeing swimming as a
birthright, Walter instinctively knew that learning to swim was a sheer
survival skill. And now he’d come to that exact crux.
Without further ado, Trey pushed Walter into the water,
whereupon he stumbled in the mud and fell face down getting a couple of ounces
of the acrid lake in his nostrils. As Trey began to kick him in the behind, he
coughed. To escape the foot flogging, Walter crawled forward through the muck,
going in deeper, until the slimy floor fell away, and he was left in opaque
liquid. Without question, he was going to die. He would drown pathetically in
the town reservoir. The boys would go up
for murder, or just as likely, they’d go free, as there were no witnesses. The
other three boys would be too afraid of Trey to crack and confess. Unless
Beaver turned out to have a heart and a conscience after all, which was
possible.
The water invaded Walter’s lungs, and he prepared mentally
for the death agony. His limbs flailed,
at first as hysterical spasms then in slower motion. In the mud-stained water,
he saw a fish body pass by, then another, disappearing and circling back to
cruise past his other side. Pathetically, despite his weak display of pseudo
knowledge on the shore, he knew nothing about fish. It was as though he’d been
ashamed to really learn the taxonomy and the biology of his so-called kind. His
stance had been evasion. More fish crowded around Walter, silver and brown,
plump and slender, and he became aware that he was breathing underwater. His
arms and legs had relaxed and were swimming. He could see, or perhaps sense,
with greater clarity what was going on around him. Particles hung suspended in
a shaft of light penetrating the surface. What from above would have showed as
open water held rock shelves, places for aquatic life to rest, hide, dart in
and out of, populate. Fish were observing him, some touching his sides and head
with their scales, as if to encourage, others keeping their distance simply
curious about this hybrid creature in their midst, so like them yet so unlike
them.
On he swam, no longer caring, exploring the lake with ever
stronger kicks and strokes. He half-expected that he would metamorphose into
one of them. He’d stay here underwater, maybe for an hour or two, maybe for a
day. Maybe for a long time. Maybe forever. He nipped at a strand of algae with
his mouth. It tasted like kombu. Perfect for a vegan.
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About the Author
Johnny Payne is a novelist, short story writer,
poet, playwright and essayist. He directs the MFA in Creative Writing at
Mount Saint Mary's University, Los Angeles. Often, he has written about
his native Kentucky and sometimes enjoys writing historically. His novels
have been set in England, Ireland, Peru and various places in the U.S. Payne
enjoys changing styles and experimenting with form as he explores the full
range of his characters' emotions and psyches. Frequently his writing
examines the comic and absurd side of humanity. Payne was the founding
director of the first bilingual Spanish-English MFA in the United States.
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