The First Flathead of Spring

Below the cotton white puffs of thick mist hanging in the sky, cool gray bubbles rise and float under a long, flat blue. Deep down a plump womanly flathead lies suspended in the motionless rhythm of the early spring pond, empty eyes wide open, slick skin breathing and tasting the waterborne muck, her gentle black feelers dragging lightly over the rocks on the bottom.

Her powerful hunger grows stronger every minute. That hunger makes her mad. Although her senses are tuned to the flavor of her surroundings, she does not savor the fantastic din of madness outside and above her, the waiting madness of beings who drink by the sounds of a dry air, wildly craving even more than she can imagine. She slumbers with her numb desire, unaware that the dull beat of an approaching screw signals her fate. Her murky silence is doomed to collide with the light and sound of an unapologetic, alien world.

So it is that one day soon the slight aroma of pig fat will drift along the water from an unknown distance, enveloping her body in a tingling warm bath of magnetic rush. She will surge left, then right with a shift of her tail and before long she will have the source of the sweet scent effectively surrounded.

She will lunge uncontrollably for the bite but she will not see what is attached. She will not taste what is tethered to her attraction and, even if she could, she could not fight her compulsions. She will swallow quickly without a second thought, without a first thought, and when the tarnished shock of the moment sets its barbed hook in her cheek she will run as fast as she can.

But she can't run forever. No one thing can. After she tires of the escape attempt, with luck, she and I will meet face to face. And then, for a moment that may last us both a lifetime, her silent existence below the surface will tragically balance on how happy I am to finally see her arrive so loudly above it.

Silly, I know, even before the splash of the battle has dried, I will release her if she is the first.

I know the pond would not miss her. I know there would be no hole left in the water, the boiling surface will swallow back into itself nearly as quickly as she is removed from it, and there are surely plenty of fish in the sea. If I kept her I might even be doing her peers a grand favor.

But, if she is the first, I will send her back to where she came from and hope that my gift is returned some day. She will dash away and hide for a time before our hungers again drive us mad. By then she will have no painful recollection of feeding on dangerously sweet pig fat and she'll have no memory of that crazy, hard to see creature who once rudely plucked her from her home only to delight in his enjoyment as she flopped around in a tasteless, suffocating air. By then I will forget my short-lived honor to nature. I will be overcome by the thrill of the chase and the pleasure of simple food.

And then we will all go back to the fluid beginning, the endless waiting and the cold craving, just like we always do.

Cheers,
Mb