Rainbow Fish, I Hate You by Annika Haakonsen
Oh, Rainbow Fish, stop giving away those iridescent scales to people you love. Those scales don’t grow back. You are a poorly constructed childhood character – the controversial offspring of some pseudo-Mother-Goose who thought transactional conformism was a better bedtime story than anything Aesop came up with.
You swim stupidly around waiting to drown in a brine of your own fishy stink. The algae has turned this whole tank green, which is your favorite color, yes, but it makes your skin slick with slime, and it clogs your pores and dulls the shine of your hair and deepens the stains on your teeth. You can’t seem to shower it away or groom it out, so you sit in the filth, and you let it spread. You’re just a fish. What else are you supposed to do? What do you know about describing the crushing weight of deep blue fathoms to sand suckers and silt dwellers?
So, keeping with brackish marine themes, this fish will migrate — travel upstream — to the muddy clay of man-made Oklahoma swimming holes. Flip your fins in this fecal water, sun your scales, feel the beer bubble off of you in an unfamiliarly dry open heat. The land here is flat, just like the water. You can look out onto empty fields and plains and see absolutely nothing, not even the curve of the earth. Everything stands stoically — a house, a tree, a creek full of stagnant, dead branches. Your fishy ears (which are just holes, really) are subject to the pop and crackle of shitty earbuds you will buy at a gas station somewhere that feels like nowhere. Blankness is the best way to describe a place like this.
And then eventually you will return to that familiar tank, propped up in cheap righteous ornateness behind some stupid lonely bar in South Slope. Tomorrow you won’t remember swimming home through frescoed sewers or poking your gills out of the manholes that billow hot green steam onto midtown avenues. You will remember only what you see presently through lidless nictitating membranes before ultimately forgetting again. Fish have a terrible memory after all, and are illiterate (as far as I can tell), so at least you will have that going for you.
So, keeping with brackish marine themes, this fish will migrate — travel upstream — to the muddy clay of man-made Oklahoma swimming holes. Flip your fins in this fecal water, sun your scales, feel the beer bubble off of you in an unfamiliarly dry open heat. The land here is flat, just like the water. You can look out onto empty fields and plains and see absolutely nothing, not even the curve of the earth. Everything stands stoically — a house, a tree, a creek full of stagnant, dead branches. Your fishy ears (which are just holes, really) are subject to the pop and crackle of shitty earbuds you will buy at a gas station somewhere that feels like nowhere. Blankness is the best way to describe a place like this.
And then eventually you will return to that familiar tank, propped up in cheap righteous ornateness behind some stupid lonely bar in South Slope. Tomorrow you won’t remember swimming home through frescoed sewers or poking your gills out of the manholes that billow hot green steam onto midtown avenues. You will remember only what you see presently through lidless nictitating membranes before ultimately forgetting again. Fish have a terrible memory after all, and are illiterate (as far as I can tell), so at least you will have that going for you.
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