Spectrum Literary Arts Magazine: Spring 2018

The Journey Laura Ma - Part I: Gerard Gerard is a male, orange koi fish. He swims in a fake pond at a Chinese restaurant that also serves Japanese food, but most humans who eat there don’t know the difference. Gerard certainly doesn’t.

Usually, Gerard is fed fish food in the morning by the one-eyed chef, but today something is thrown into the pond at an unusual hour in the evening. It is a sliver of cabbage meant to garnish orange chicken. He chokes on it and dies. He becomes posthumously famous among the other koi fish in the pond and they remember Gerard as a martyr for choking on the cabbage thrown into the pond by an untamed human child.

In fish afterlife, Gerard joins a choked-on-something-besides-fish-food anon group full of other fish who were met with untimely deaths by ingesting objects not meant for fish consumption. Here, he meets Roberta, a blue tang that becomes his dead fish wife. They have a ceremony in a chapel under the sea. No one is invited and they quietly marry.

Years pass. And then more years pass. They realize they have not aged. Then, even more years pass and they realize that they swim within the same seven cubic feet every day.

Gerard disregards the discovery. Roberta, however, is unsettled by it and grows increasingly anxious until she increases their cubic space from seven to eight feet cubed. Gerard is unexpectedly upset by the change and divorces Roberta.

- Part II: Roberta Roberta wanders through uncharted waters of the afterlife until she reaches a village with an assortment of dead fish dedicated to living minimalistically. They drink only water and absorb only sunlight, with the addition of ritualistically consuming fish peyote. They offer her water, sunlight and peyote and she accepts.

She integrates well into the village and after a number of years, she assumes the role of peyote shamaness. During a ritual she suddenly recalls the fact that she does not know how she arrived in the afterlife. She also remembers that she lied about her story in the chokedon-something-besides-fish-food anon group in order to impress Gerard, who thought her story about jumping out of the fish tank and into a glass of Chardonnay was romantic. She does not know what to do with the memory.

Shaken again by this epiphany, Roberta leaves the village and wanders aimlessly. North, South, West, East. Is up down, or is down up? She decides, arbitrarily, that she is swimming at a forty-five degree angle upwards even though no origin exists. Time passes. Perhaps a day, but then again it could be a year. Roberta is uncertain.

After an undefined amount of time, Roberta sees the surface of the water glistening in the distance. Surprised, she swims towards the light. As she draws closer and closer to the surface, her body dissipates into hundreds and millions of particles as she is engulfed by a blinding light. She felt as if she could feel the entire spectrum of her fish emotions all at once.

Bliss and misery became one. Oddly, she has never felt any emotion to begin with, but now it was as if the entirety of her being was purely emotion.

Without warning, she appears in one piece as an orange koi fish in a fake pond located ina Chinese restaurant that also serves Japanese food, but Roberta does not know the difference, and neither do the guests who came to eat there.

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