A Winter Break Submission
By Ferdison Cayetano | Guest Contributor
Originally published in Dog Street Journal's February 2020 issue.
This isn’t exactly my proudest moment, but over break I got dared to eat a can of fish food—and I did.
Listen, you don’t have my group of friends, all right? Back in high school that’s all we would ever do. We would dare each other to do something stupid and laugh uproariously whenever something went wrong. And oh, how things would go wrong. Spectacularly wrong.
Jump into the pool. From the roof. Yeah, you won’t.
Bro. Hurry up. Nobody’s even around, just light the damn firecracker.
Hey. You two. Start a fight. Just have a fight right here in this Applebee’s.
And each sprained ankle or daring escape from the local cops or mass ban from a chain restaurant would only draw us closer together. It carried on like that for years, us against the world. A band of merry idiots. Now we’re at college, though, and we’re all in different states. We see each other less. Despite all the calls, all the texts, all the visits, we can feel it.
We’re drifting apart.
It’s nobody’s fault, but the calls just come to a stop. So do the visits. But over breaks we’d still try, you know? We’d still hang out. For old times’ sake.
So you understand that this wasn’t just a can of fish food. These were lifelong friendships on the line, and I didn’t care how bad the damn thing would taste. I’d eat all of it. Every last flake.
God, it tasted like fish. Isn’t that a little screwed up? I wish I could describe it properly. It was like the concentrated essence of fish. Fish times a thousand.
I want you to imagine it: the smell. Piercing, sharp, clogging up your nostrils for hours afterwards. I want you to imagine spooning it into your mouth with one hand and gagging because it’s so dry. Imagine the flakes lodging deep into your gums, your tongue, your throat. The desperate churning in your stomach. After what feels like an eternity, you’ll put the can down, watery-eyed and coughing, but content in your false victory.
Because this is what will happen next.
In the following week or so, you’ll start to notice some… differences. You’ll notice that you feel parched all the time. Dry. All the bottled water in the world couldn’t help you now. Nothing can help you now.
You’re only comfortable in the pool, or the bath. Is your skin getting drier? Scalier? It’s probably too much time in the water.
The world is becoming foggier. Greyer. You no longer remember things like you used to. Sometimes you forget even your own name. The entirety of your being is succumbing to the basest of instincts, instincts that only seem more natural to you as time goes on. Eat. Lay eggs. Follow the current. Swim. Swim. Swim.
Your friends, your lover, your parents, anyone, everyone; they all abandon you. They no longer recognize the …thing… you have become.
Walking is hard. Too hard. You spend all your time in the water now. You’re constantly in pain—it is the pain of change, of structures beneath your flaking skin being created and destroyed.
Those lines. Across your neck.
Gills.
The grey haze has thickened, has settled. Reality blurs. You’re at the supermarket, cart full of fish food, aching to get back in the water, and a toddler looks at you and screams. You’re back in middle school, and the teacher is yelling at you—yes, you—you insolent children. Stop laughing. Let’s see if you keep laughing when you’re all in detention together, and of course that only makes you laugh harder...
A white flash. Pain. You’ve just been hit across the face—was it Evan Peters? That dickhead. He’s embarrassing you in front of Jennifer, in front of all of them. You’re the only reason he’s even passing junior year. Was it that security guard, subduing you for the umpteenth time as you screamed and begged and pleaded to be let into the aquarium? Or was it simply the concrete of a damp parking lot, the price you paid for the sweet relief of a shallow puddle festering in the cracks after the rain?
Memories. Human memories, for a human mind, that will never be needed again. They flash before you, one last time, a confusing medley of images that are beyond your comprehension. Too much of you has changed.
You no longer know your own name. You no longer understand the concept behind the word ‘name.’ You scream.
You black out. You dream of fish.
By the time you come to, a single, primal instinct has overrun even the last remnants of your consciousness:
Swim.