Fish

Where the TV should be, Liam has a fishtank.

I like fishtanks, he said. He was six years old. He’s liked fishtanks ever since.

He’s thirty-five now. He sits in his easy chair, face less than a foot away from the glass, and stares.

There’s nothing out there that moves like fish. Fish look like aliens from outer space, exploring earth for the first time. No matter how many laps they take, they see things for the first time. It’s beautiful.

Liam has a job, unfortunately. His job requires many liberties, like human contact and human suffering. The only antidote there is to human suffering is fish. Nobody else knows it. But Liam does.

He comes home after twelve hours of stacking shelves and fixes himself up a nightcap. His nightcap is half a pint of red wine, the cheapest kind he can find. He pours it into a mug with a picture of a goat on it. He dreams of killing that goat, with a keen eye and a deft hand. But he doesn’t. He just drinks from it instead.

His easy chair feels like a sack of rotting limbs when he sinks down into it. But his fish are seeing him for the first time. And their eyes pop out and their mouths say ‘ooooo!’ and suddenly Liam is happy again. He sees the world for the first time again.

There are different kinds of fish inside his tank. Big puffy red fish with white stripes running over those silky gills. Small yellow fish with black dots that weave in and out of tiny holes inside the fake plastic rocks. Long, ugly things with tentacles and googly eyes. Pink slender fingers that bend around the corners. But every single fish has one thing in common: every time they look, they see something for the first time.

Liam thinks about having a girlfriend. What it would mean to share this moment with another human. Feel their warmth heat the room. Turn his half pint of wine into half a half. Trade the easy chair in for a sofa. And sit there together, watching the fish see love for the first time.

One day maybe. But not today. Today the fish are only seeing his goat mug of wine for the first time. And the bags around his eyes. And the receding hairline that doesn’t seem to have a horizon. And that’s enough. Really, it’s enough.

He stands up and thinks about the earth. If this was the first time he saw everything, what would he see?

He looks at his fish and smiles. I’d see this, he says. And the ugly one with the googly eyes looks like its face is about to implode. And it does. It simply bursts, like a grape squished between two thumbs. And all the other fish see an asteroid exploding in the sky for the first time. And the debris floats around like wet carrot peel. And the fish swim around and see beauty for the first time.

By Emyr Payne