At six, I circuited summer festivals as a goldfish dipper. The fish flashed celestial in the pool, searing the clasped paper boats that would sail them away. But my hands were quick currents, catching fish faster than fire. No burning licks could move lickety-split like little fingers after the lure of the veiltail.
My wispy-finned calico grew large in ornamental gardens, criss-crossing the ponds that I dug for her by hand. She learned to tell my face from a stranger’s, to discern Bach from Stravinsky though she showed no distinct preference.
When I married at twenty, the fish was a foot long and friend to a dozen Ramshorn snails. On our first anniversary, I gave my wife a goldfish so that she could have luck of her own. By conspiracy and coincidence, we never did have children, but kept a troubling of goldish until the veiltail lay slantwise and my wife bled heavily and late.
Desolate, we left the countryside for an island continent, where I took a riverside gig as a goldfish catcher. Still nimble-fingered, I sling feral fish into slurries of ice. They are abandoned companions inflicting a dire imbalance that becomes a widening gyre as they swim ever farther from home. Within a generation they grow harder to find, slipping back to mud and silver after a millennium of gold. Their eyes see us in ultraviolet and infrared, while we try to recognize them at all. Back in the lab, we freeze the sleeping fish to finis.
As yet, I’ve only snuck one pearlscale home. She looked confounded when she woke alone in a backyard pond. I fed her lavishly, bloodworms and brine shrimp, recreated an ecosystem of turtles, duckweed, and water sprites. It still took her five months to forget the river.
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Jade Wallace's poetry, fiction, and essays have been published or are forthcoming internationally, including in Vallum Magazine, PRISM International, Room Magazine, Canthius, Studies in Social Justice, and The Stockholm Review. They are an organizing member of Draft Reading Series and their most recent chapbook is Test Centre (ZED Press 2019) under the moniker MA|DE.