Ode to a Dead Fish

A Story by Clyde Grauke

Flash nonfiction memoir.

Somewhere across the immense topography of time, in a little inlet lapping peacefully along the shore, you are still swimming. A flash of silver darting among waving plants in the dappled sunlight. You have no name and you took no thought of yourself. Your future was just right around the bend.

Around that bend something happened, maybe to the water, and you floated serenely down to settle into the sands of time. You lay nicely stretched out while you were covered by the blankets of eons for a long winter's sleep.

Then there came a time when the sun shone once again on your bed in the sand. Your bed had grown hard while the world had gone on about its way since you first lay down. Someone scratching around in the rocks had found you and broken you loose from the rest of your familiar sand and had put you up for sale. I don't know how many hands you passed through before I bought you. I gave you as a gift to my father. You see, he was a fisherman...not a great or famous one...he was, like you, just one individual in a sea of many, going about his life, and he loved to fish.

You had a special place in my parent's kitchen where you could look down on their meals and private conversations. Those days are over now. My father is still probably fishing somewhere far away as he and my mother sleep in the blankets of their homeland.

So you came back to be with me where you watch the back of my head as I type this...a flash of a moment for you to observe as you lay there with your slightly surprised look and a grim smile frozen on your face.