Gasping at the Surface
It was not a surprise that her story got swept under the sea. After all, she hardly stunned her suitors with her boy cut hair singed at the ends from bending her head too close to her hands while soldering ultrasonic sensors onto her tail, her dull grey scales that absorbed rather than reflected the sun out of the sea, her callused hands from rock climbing attempts up and out of the ocean. And yet she, not any of her sisters with their hair layered to look thicker, their scintillating scales, their delicate, baby-lotion treated hands, was scooped out of the sea by some dashing prince while her sisters got entangled in the nets of Japanese whale hunters.
Or perhaps, she was scooped up by a netonto land, choking and gasping for breath, too preoccupied with adjusting to the “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups” Air Quality Index than to be concerned about consent and rights. The average lifespan of a goldfish in captivity was known to be about fifteen years and the average lifespan of a human was hardly worth considering. Although with their fifty-eight nerve receptors on their faces and heads, goldfish, unless injected with morphine, perceived pain in what she imagined the same way humans did: first a jolt and then PTSD two hours later. She had her priorities straight.
The prince put her in a tank and charged each of his fellow princes from other countries one thousand dollars through Zelle to see her, for even though her features possessed no conventional beauty, she became a novelty and an image of intrigue: the princes stared at her in the same way one might stare at a Vampire Squid flying through water. But as the months passed, the visits grew less and less frequent, the prince busy with real women who had real legs, so she sat in her tank glub glub-ing bubbles to the surface.
At first, she had only asked a servant to accompany her in the water and play the who-can-hold-your-breath-longer game. Both knew she would win, but the servants pitied the displaced creature and obliged to entertain. She learned that human strength manifested in their weapons of nets and boats and guns, not in their fat to muscle ratio. She learned how easy it was to coax a human into holding their breath for just one second longer, until a final few bubbles popped to the surface, any violent thrashing silenced.
If you asked whether or not she was holding anyone down in the water, she would say no, but in truth she did not remember. Her attention jumped around with each glub glub and she only remembered counting the bubbles that popped at the surface. The results remained inconclusive: does one feel pain while drowning? Did she feel pain as the oxygen levels in her tank dropped?
Or is suffocation more of a mental thing? A quality her short-lived self missed out on
as a goldfish disguised as a human
as a human disguised as a goldfish.
Lucy Zhang is a software engineer and holds a B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science. She watches anime, writes poetry and fiction (when patient enough), and sleeps in on weekends like a normal human being. She can be found at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter (@Dango_Ramen).