Short Short Fiction by Jan Steckel

FISHES IN THE SKY

David is afraid of the surf at first. His parents run him into it, laughing, this is the Ocean! When it reaches for his ankles, he screams -- it wants to kill him! He flies back up to the beach towels. Though his older sister Rachel jeers, he won't be coaxed. Look, says his father, at the fishes in the waves. David comes a little nearer. Can you see them, myriad and black? A little more, sidling cautiously. There! Minnows swarm like summer gnats. They are slim black fingers. Shall I catch some for you? Oh yes. His father fills the yellow plastic pail with sea-water. Soon it is full of darting minnows and carried home.

The garden hose makes prickles in David's skin, driving all the grit off. His mother towels him and Rachel down and gives them American cheese and orange juice to hold them until dinner. He slip-slaps around in new flap-jacks, not minding the rubber thong cutting between his toes. Slap! Slap! He folds his cheese in origami patterns and slaps onto the back porch to look into the pail.

A black body floats slack on the surface while its fellows squirm beneath. Daddy, (pointing), What's wrong with that one? Father says it must be dead and explains the fishly need for aerated sea-water. David insists they take the fish back now. Dinner is cooking, however, and the beach is far away. He cries and screams. Dinner is served, but he won't eat. One by one the small fish die, till not a one is left.

*****

David dreams about a new gadget, a mechanical roller with a scroll of paper on it. As he turns a knob pictures come out. First little fish swim up and down the paper strip. Then out come amphibians puffing pouches at their throats and pushing paddled feet through the water. He laughs and keeps turning the knob. The amphibians turn into dinosaurs crawling up from the slime. A dragon rears its snorting nostrils -- with a start he awakes. Rachel is breathing heavily through her nose across the room. A few seconds later the space-heater breaks into its comforting hum. Then asleep. Now awake. He looks up. Over his bed, where the gray window light intersects the red glow of the heater, a fish is swimming in the air.

Quickly he turns his head away and stares at the pillow. In the wrinkles of the pillowcase, there the little fish swim. He grabs his teddy bear and holds him against the wall, and looks at him hard. There. For a moment he sees only the bear and the gray-white wall. But behind the bear's head, like a slide projection, he soon perceives the silhouette of a man standing on a pier's end, arms akimbo, with waves lapping at the pilings beneath. David calls his mother, once, twice, and finally she comes.

He tells her what he has seen, and she comforts him. No matter. Look what we'll do. She pushes his bed over next to Rachel's. There now. Whasamatter, Rachel murmurs. Go back to sleep, whispers his mother, and bends to kiss her. Sleep tight. She kisses David, and leaves the door ajar.

There are three kinds of light in the room now: gray through the window, red out of the heater, and yellow from the hall. David looks over at Rachel and sees a fishbowl sitting on her head, with goldfish swimming round and round in it. He is partly afraid of them, and partly afraid they might die. If the bowl should fall and break...

Rachel!

Mmm?

There's a fish tank on your head.

I'll knock it off, she mutters drowsily. She passes her hand over her head, and it goes right through the fishbowl, goldfish and all.

Mo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-m!!!

******

(Gina): When you were a kid, didn't you ever make sand-castles on the beach?

(David): Yes.

(Gina): -- did you ever get handfuls of what looked like those tiny colored beads you buy in hobby shops?

(David): I think so.

(Gina): Those were grunion eggs! When the tide is highest, three nights out of three months, that's when they run. The waves wash them up in the dark, male and female. They flip-flop up the beach and slap around until they bump into each other. She bores her tail into the sand and lays her eggs, then he lets loose all over them. All that flapping around covers the eggs back up, and the surf pulls the grunion back into the midnight sea, flashing bits of silver as every wave goes down. Unless we catch them, like we're going to do tonight! Nets are illegal, and so's a dredge. You catch them with your hands. Otherwise they'd all get scooped up at the moment of ecstasy and there'd be the end of the breed. Actually (voice lowering), catching them at all's illegal now, but I know a place. They're a delicacy. You can eat them with their heads on, they're so little, and their bones just crunch. We'll sift them in piles like pieces of eight -- and a royal fish-fry in the morning!

*****

Laughter ripples up and down the dark beach, over the plash-plash of bare feet and the slapping of the bucketed grunion. David's jeans are rolled up to his knees, and he carries a silver flashlight. Low in the southeastern sky the yellow moon hangs brilliant. Moonlight sparks the whitecaps far, far out, but northward high bluffs shade the beach. Guardian cliffs curve toward Point Dume, enclosing sand like the crook of an arm. Into this crook, this inner elbow, safe from the gaudy lunar light, the trusting grunion swim.

The others flit from fish to fish, but David stands amazed. Incredulous joy rises in him, and he strains to contain it. Here is fragmented beauty in a thousand silver flashes on the sand. Feeling as if he is in a dream, he raises his light and passes it over the water's receding edge. There! He starts to run toward a glimmer momentarily fixed in the beam. A new excitement vibrates through him. He stoops, squats and shoots a hand out -- gotcha! His victory shout switches to one of alarm as the fish squirms in his grasp. He tightens his hold on the slippery, jerking, beautiful thing. As he does so, a liquid line of tiny colored beads streams from the fish's underbelly, falling at his feet. He holds the fish out from him against the sky. Throw -- this -- in a bucket?

He cannot stem the upward flow of pure revulsion from his center, into a sour and watery mouth. He opens his fingers; an inch of water swirls the fish away as he retches into the surf. He vomits and coughs, drawing a ring of baffled faces. He straightens, finally, and in shame rebuffs concern. Yes, I'm all right. He pushes past, fleeing unsteadily Gina's proffered arm.

He stumbles back to the empty cars that wait on the edge of the sand. Sitting down on a bumper, he cradles his head in his hands. Between the booming of each wave, faint cries and laughter blow up from the beach. At irregular intervals his stomach heaves. Under the twisting bodies of the captured, sperm mingles futilely with a million eggs in the bottoms of a dozen buckets.

*****

(Rachel): When I was a kid (tapping down a cigarette) we lived in a two-story house, with all kinds of pictures hung along the wall of the stairs. Pictures of me and my brother in Santa Claus's lap and pictures we made, mixed in with brass rubbings and a lot of tacky prints. My little brother David and I used to knock the pictures every which way by accident when we'd come tearing down the stairs. (A lighter flashes.) Thanks. (Two puffs.) There was this linoleum block on the wall that David had carved in nursery school. It was hung by one little hole punched in the center of its back, over a single nail, so it could spin pretty freely. The carving was of a couple of stylized fish with a wavy line over their heads -- you know how kids draw water -- and a radial sun shining down from the upper right-hand corner. One time I passed it and saw that one of us had knocked it upside-down. You wouldn't notice right off because it was all one gray and the line of the water -- (she leans forward to tap the ashes off her cigarette into a potted fern) -- was right in the middle, so it didn't look much different upside-down. I reached out to turn it around -- but then I stopped, and left it the way it was. (Smiling) Because, you see, there was something very nice about fishes in the sky and the sun shining up from the sea.



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JAN STECKEL is an Oakland, California writer and a Harvard- and Yale-trained pediatrician. Her fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry have appeared in the print and web journals Hospital Physician, Yale Medicine, Problem Child and Awakened Woman, among others, as well as in the anthologies Becoming Doctors (Student Doctors Press) and WomanPrayers (HarperSF).

Bilingual in Spanish and English, she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic before taking care of Latino children as a pediatrician first within the California public health system and later in a large HMO. You can read more of her work and contact her through her web site at http://www.jansteckel.com.

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