Sample

Fish Story

It's a fish-eat-fish world,” Angelo the catfish said to no one in particular as he swept along the sandy bottom. That was just one of the mottos Angelo lived by and that was what he expected from life — fish eat fish. His fish whiskers turned over bits of gravel in his endless search to uncover and discover truth with a capital T, whatever that may be and find some festering morsel to eat.” Over the course of his longish life Angelo learned that the big fish eat the small fish, the strong fish always eat the weak fish, the live fish eat the dead fish and the snails eat everything.

“Don’t stick your whiskers in the sucking tube,” and “Never swim all the way into a small, dark cave, especially if it’s Mycave’s” were two other mottos that guided his life. “It’s a  fish-eat-fish world,” he said again.

Angelo was strong, but he never abused his strength to intimidate the other fish. He regarded every fish as a potential, eventual meal, but he didn’t chase them. A creature of infinite patience, he simply waited for the inevitable. He was quite the sage. “If I bide my time, if I continue breathing, moving water through my gills, everything will come my way in good time.” At that very instant, as if to illustrate the point, he turned over a particularly delicious particle of someone long-gone. He sniffed and remembered Roger, the arrogant red tail platy. “It’s a fish-eat-fish world,” he said and sucked it up with relish like a vacuum cleaner.

Angelo's words did not go unheard. Inches away, hugging the sandy bottom, a golden speck that might have been mistaken for a shiny piece of gravel, moved! It was Five, the fifth of a brood of eleven born during the night to Fansee the guppy. Just hours old, Five already understood the meaning of Angelo's words. Survival was the lesson he learned in the night when he saw his sibling fry, Eight and Ten, gobbled up instantly by the nasty tiger barbs, Tā-Gor and Tē-Gar. Unlike the docile, patient Angelo, the brothers worked like a team attacking and devouring anything that moved, which often included each other. Even Angelo wasn't immune, so he avoided them whenever he could. When he couldn't, he endured their assaults, content in his knowledge that eventually they would pick each other apart. Then he would have the last laugh cleaning up their remains. Five didn't know Tā-Gor and Tē-Gar 's names, but he felt the danger they projected, like a charge of electricity throughout the water.

During the night, just after Five was born, instinct propelled him to the surface where he remained motionless, paralyzed with fear watching the other fish from his hiding place in the floating plants. The tiger barbs sharked back and forth through the water and tore through the plants snapping up his brothers and sisters who had made the fatal mistake of moving. Five had witnessed Seven avoid the advances of Gollub, a giant kissing gourami with a voracious appetite for live food, only to swim to close to the sucking tube and get pulled up and carried off to The Place Somewhere Beyond, which is what the others called the top of the water. Throughout the long night all of Five’s brothers and sisters became quick meals and were gone. But he was still alive. So he remained hidden in the plants barely moving his little fins enough to circulate the water so he could breathe. He was sure that he was the only one of the brood who had survived.

© 2018 Joseph E. Scalia from Fish Story A Modern Fable for Big Kids and Grownups

                                                    

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