Fan Fiction ❯ One Fish ❯ One-Shot

Meghan Lamb

One Fish

"I don't like him."

Ms. Johnson's room was quiet for once, but lacking no intensity from the tightly drawn hush of a child's concentration. She could almost see it strung through their ears like telephone wire, an innocent fascination that connected them.

White wall tiles bubbled around a box of 2nd grade students, immuring the fish tank. This was their observation exercise, in which they had been instructed to sketch their favorite fish, name it, describe it, and compose a 100 word theme about a day in the fish's life. A prim assignment, thought Ms. Johnson, but it would strengthen their use of adjectives and tidy metaphor, give them something to relate to. Children this age always needed something to relate to.

"I don't like him."

A braided blonde girl was pointing into the tank, eyes wide open with a strangely indignant expression. She had been complaining about this exercise before, so Ms. Johnson delivered her an admonishing twitch of the neck. The girl continued to protest, so she pasted this with her calm teacher voice.

"What is it about the fish that you don't care for, Amy?"

"I hate him."

Ms. Johnson shook her head. It was important to rinse these strong words out of children, especially the word "hate." In a world of gory generalities and adverses, the young must be trained to soften their speech. "Unhappy" in place of "angry," "I don't care for," in place of "I hate."

"Say `I don't care for the fish,' instead," she instructed.

"But I hate him; he's ugly. Look, you can see right through his body," the girl made a face and squirmed her fingers around the end of her braid. "What kind of a fish is that?"

"It's not a boy fish!" one of the students, a male, protested.

"I still don't like it," said the girl.

"Shhh! Children!" Ms. Johnson clapped her hands. "It doesn't matter what the fish is- back to work, back to work…"

* * *

In another part of the landscape, a man was dreaming.

This man, a doctor who happened to be of prominence, sat on a park bench, which happened to be absolutely filthy. He dusted it absently with the sleeves of his trench coat before settling into the Autumn scenery. Taking a book- a biography of Marie Curie- from his leather bag, he attempted to block the day from his mind. No good. He heard the thin sounds of leaves rustling and people chatting, cloying the thick brown morning air. Then all of a sudden, there was a distant laugh as a child and his family left. The wind stopped. Everything was silent.

The sounds of life passing were almost as mercurial as the nature of time itself. Well there, at last he could think. He had to think, and it was the last thing he wanted to do. He had watched the death of a 15-year-old boy today.

* * *

"One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish," recited the blonde girl. "But this isn't a red fish or a blue fish. It's just plain ugly."

"Perhaps you'd like to feed the fish today, Amy?" Ms. Johnson offered plaintively. She was too tired to deal with this. An argument she had last night with her son, Ethan, dangled over her on precarious strands of duty and composure.

"The boys have been teasing you again?" she had asked, noticing his shadowed eyes.

"Mother, they beat the shit out of me," he said levelly.

She apologized, washed his injuries, and inquired whether he needed any help with his chemistry homework.

"We need to talk to someone," he warned her.

"They'll only make you more conspicuous, Ethan. It will get worse."

He had swallowed then, and turned away. "Mom… I'm afraid I might do something to myself if I don't talk to someone."

Ethan had always been a bit on the short side, the frail side, the quiet side. Afflicted with his father's stigmatism, he was never without a pair of thick rimmed black glasses and a heavy volume of Kafka, Sartre, or Tolstoy- quite a sight in the high school hallway among burly young men in sports jerseys, hand-slapping clowns and extroverts, blonde girls with skinny-strapped bags to coordinate with their physique. He rarely spoke in class, but when he did, he poured forth a shy train of thick words, like "existentialism," "reciprocity," and "doppelganger." His classmates learned quickly to hate him, unwilling to face the fears within their own inability to articulate.

It was an old story, and Ethan knew that. He knew that the girls who looked at him as if he were a child failed to recognize the well-lined, senescent thoughts that fueled his tripping speeches, each clumsy, book-toting journey. He knew that the outgoing boys who brushed him off in conversation were superficial, hungry for the attention of his more illustrious contemporaries. He knew that the football players who called him "fag" were ignorant; it didn't matter. It didn't matter what any of them thought, but that wasn't what bothered him: Though he vividly understood himself, they would never know who Ethan Johnson really was.

As Ms. Johnson watched the blonde girl wag her tongue in front of the "ugly" fish, she knew this as well. Regardless of what Ethan dreamed and felt, he would always be different; he would always be the problem.

* * *

The doctor put down Marie-Curie and let his mind twist the people around him, twist the warm sky as it always did when things went wrong.

There had been nothing he could do. The boy had been rushed in ten minutes ago, trembling and gray-skinned. He had called the paramedics after swallowing a bottle of Codene, Zoloft, and Effexor, whispering that he hadn't meant to do this. But the boy had waited too long; he died at 10:03 in the ambulence.

Shuddering, the doctor recalled his look of strange longing, recalled the experience of that longing as a 15-year-old boy, and realized it could have so easily been him. "It could have been many others," he told himself, lighting his cigarette with a defeated half-smile.

* * *

The phone rang. Her heart stopped. "Hello?" The voice on the other end of the line was so sterile. Her hand moved to her wrist, and a low hiss escaped her.

As the tears began to fall, her students stared, all but Amy, who was watching the fish.