Fiction from Melissa Fitzpatrick

Photo: Mostafa Ashram Mostafa

Only Water, Then Sky 

When you’re a fish, it doesn’t occur to you to look up, to try to see past the edge of the known world. There is only water, and how the water moves the kelp, and how the kelp moves with the water, back and forth, back and forth, sometimes gently, and sometimes not. The world is light, then dark, then light again, and you do not wonder why. You do not know about the sun passing overhead. You have never seen clouds, how they sail across the sky.

You may be a slow kind of fish, but the way you move is precise. You swish your tail, you flutter your fins. You can go up and down, forward, backward. You can get yourself to just the right spot. The place you like best is near the top of the world, a place where the kelp dances in the light.

You know nothing of the sky. It’s beyond your imagining that one day a sky creature will slice through the water. That its talons will pierce you, will thrash you, will pull you out through the top of the world. That, for a moment, you will soar in the sky creature’s grasp. Wide-eyed and gasping. Wonderstruck.
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Melissa Fitzpatrick lives in the Los Angeles area. Her work has appeared in CHEAP POP, Corvid Queen, Scrawl Place, Milk Candy Review and MoonPark Review.