Thirty-Six Equinox
an excerpt

The little fish gathered around a Coelacanth once. She rose, grand and majestic from the bottoms of the world. Her milky eyes were a wonderous dark, clouded from the pain of the sun. Her brown skin was beautiful as it sloughed from her, her brown scales like little pebbles the ocean herself crafted lovingly on the shores.

The little fish nipped and pulled at her sloughing skin as it sunk to the white sand in the midst of all that blue. It tasted of the cold, rich minerals where there was no light, and cold, and sightlessness. She had come up, braved the light, like the one who had one-hundred years before her. She'd felt, in the dark, odd, smooth shapes. Heard metal creak and groan and fled from it. Felt the dust in her gills when these gigantic things came to rest at the bottom floors.

There was sand in her gills. It smelled of steel and aluminum and rust. Her curious snout had been rubbed an odd shape since youth as she tasted of these odd things come to die from above.

She had come into the bright, warm blue to see with her shallow, blurred sight the vision of these shapes of steel and aluminum, of fiberglass and resin, that had fallen and stirred the dust. The little fish ate of her and listened to the way in the dark. How strange, to see nothing except the light of other fish! How odd, to live by the ripples of the water! To never see your shoal, to hear so deep it rattled into the sharp brittle of their bones!

They flitted about her, little slivers of silver, curious little sardines, bright and boisterous triggerfish, puffers with eyes so wide they seemed to want to engulf the world at sight.

She drifted as they ate. She drifted into the nets, and the sardines, the triggerfish, the puffers flitted through the wide netting until they pulled her up, pulled her and a youth new in his scales and a juvenile white-tip and others up, thrashing against the sun on her brown skin and brown pebble scales. The bright and burnished fish flitted in a circle, for a moment, and darted away to their open seas or bright coral crevases. She was old and from the deep. Still, she remembered, in a distant way, the warm and cold when the land was whole. How odd for her to rise up like a shark pup, ignorant. Still, she was old and from the deep. Did she ever feel nets where one cannot see?

The cats licked their paws in their livingrooms and pretended to not watch the television. Those who still had claws chewed on them viciously. It is not in the nature of cats to be too distressed. They were the thinkers of households, after all. The great lady from the deepest drifted pallidly, an ugly brown against a flat, ugly blue tank. Hands caressed her and pulled at her scales. On tape, she died.

The sperm whales heard of it and kept swimming, as was their way. They dove, and dove deep. Into the silts and banks at the ocean floor, the towering sediment deposits of gas vaults, the sunken ships, they dove and set their giant, dagger-toothed mouthes to the ocean floor between the tension seal of tectonic plates and sang.

The cats licked their human's faces and curled in their laps in comfort as video footage of towns washed away. They chewed at their nails and licked the tips of their tails. Weeks later, they'd hear from songbirds of the whales, hungry and bold, cold but full in the arctic, where the bulls sparred and shook the water over one of the last wealths of fish.