Creative Writing: Fish

Another story, this is actually complete.

She had been the prima ballerina. The one girl scores of others had sabotaged with voodoo dolls and slicked floors. Her skin hung loosely from her delicate, emaciated frame. She glanced out the bare window next to her sterile single bed and put her cigarette out on the fleshy tissue of the underside of her breast. She didn’t wince, but she knew the nurse would be in soon. The heart rate monitor would betray her again.

She didn’t startle when I entered, but upon hearing my heavy footfalls the sinewy muscles of her lower back tensed. Her back was pristine. Smooth yellow-white suede, not a scar or freckle or gnarled cigarette burn to mar its purity. She didn’t move again. Not as I stroked her hair or even as I traced each of her ribs with my clumsy fingers. Her eyes remained fixated on an imaginary group of dancers outside her window, and she critiqued them in her head. They weren’t like she had been; their lips moved as they counted the beats and their feet never seemed to arch quite as perfectly as hers had.

The nurse walked in and spoke cheerily, though of what she said I couldn’t be sure. She ushered me out of the room, displeased to find the dancer naked and sporting a new ash-stained blister. As she cleaned the wound, the nurse was unsettled by how complacently the dancer cooperated. Other patients would struggle, still had the spark of a fight, but not this one. She simply existed, indifferent to all forms of pleasure and pain.

As I sat out in the morning chill on the deceptively sunny patio, it seemed almost unthinkable that I could ever leave this place. My wife, Lawrence and Amy, the firm; it all seemed so imaginary, like a sort of extended reverie inserted into the otherwise uniform memory of this gated reality.

“I know how you feel,” she spoke from right next to me. I was too startled to refute this; she had entered so silently it felt more like she had materialized next to me. I realized then that I didn’t know her walk, had never even seen her in motion, just sitting or standing still in different places. She looked in my direction, but did not look at me. Fish swan in the oceans of her eyes. They were shy fish.

Her blank face had smile lines, divulging her former humanity. I had told her about it, the pressure, the deadlines, the crying kids and needy wife and fastidious boss; I’d ranted and screamed, fallen over as my knees buckled under the weight of shame and loss. But she’d never heard, had never answered or even moved. This sudden unprovoked confirmation that there was someone lingering deep in that ravaged body [who had been listening all along] was overwhelming. My fists clenched with a wave of anger and then loneliness. I turned to stroke her but she had vanished. Just as I used to do.

Watching the dancers the next morning, she couldn’t stand their ineptitude. Their poor extension and heavy landings and unsure expressions had become unbearable. She moved silently to their courtyard, her feet moving like jersey cotton being dragged along the floor. She turned out her feet, bent her elbows just so, and took her first visible breath in three years. As the slow crescendo mounted her empty body filled with the music’s vitality. Light shot out her fingertips and the creases in her paper face deepened. The fish swam up to the front of her eyes.

As she glided back and forth across the lawn, I knew she couldn’t hear the trucks on the interstate behind the fence. Word’s aren’t the medium for everyone, that’s something I’ve learned here. There are a lot of folks who would be a lot better off if there wasn’t such an emphasis on talking. I’d felt betrayed to learn she’d heard my story. She was apologizing for her cold silence, she was screaming that she had been there all along, and she was trusting me with her own most intimate secrets.

As the music slowed she made her way toward me, still consumed in her confessions. She paused, still in first position, and I watched the flush leave her cheeks as her breath became once again inaudible, and seemed to stop completely. The fish retreated.

As the nurse escorted me back to my room with its fluorescent lights, I knew I could sign the papers soon. All the little lines that I had let serve as bars would be neatly endorsed away. The divorce, the waiving of my custody rights, and finally my own release. That simple connection had woken me up, had put that distant reverie of life back into the foreground. Who knows when or if she’ll speak again; her aging body is a much stronger cage then my silly black lines. Maybe she’s hoping to just leak out through a little ashy hole.