Signs & Oddities: A quirky collection of flash fiction Page 3

  The package was smaller than I expected. The Fed Ex guy held out his clipboard for my signature. “What the heck is in there? It was making noise all the way here.”

  “A fish.”

  “A fish?” He looked at me like I was crazy.

  “Mm-hmm. All the way from Bangkok. Amazing what you can buy on the internet these days, isn’t it?”

  “A fish, like to eat?”

  “No!” I laughed. “A prize Black Orchid, double-ray, crowntail betta.”

  “A what?”

  “A Siamese fighting fish. Can I have my package now, please?”

  He handed it to me. “Can’t you buy those at the pet store in town?”

  “Not one like this.”

  Inside, I sliced the package open. Within a thick cushion of insulating foam lay the small, clear-plastic bag, half full of water. The other half, I knew, was filled with pure oxygen, pumped in to give the fish plenty to breathe during his long journey. Bettas have a special organ inside their heads that allows them to breathe air.

  I lifted the bag for my first glimpse of my Black Orchid beauty. Something flashed in the water. I couldn’t believe it. This was not my fish! It wasn’t even a crowntail. By its short, rounded fins and subdued metallic sheen, it looked like some kind of plakat, the wild-type betta used in Asia for fighting, not the spectacular show fish I’d ordered. I dropped the bag on the table and rushed to my computer. If that blasted fish dealer was online, I was going to give him a piece of my mind!

  Wait. Open the bag.

  I turned back. That was true. The poor fish had had a long journey. It wasn’t his fault he wasn’t the one I wanted. This mix-up could take days to straighten out. In the meantime, the least I could do was let the fish use the waiting tank I had set up.

  I floated the plastic bag in the tank, to let the water temperatures stabilize while I logged on to my computer. I was in luck. The Thai fish dealer was also online.

  “What are you trying to pull?” I typed. “You sent me the wrong fish!”

  There was a long pause. Then he typed back, “Wrong fish?”

  “Yes, it’s the wrong fish. Where’s my crowntail?”

  “What fish?”

  “Don’t play dumb! I ordered a Black Orchid crowntail and you sent me this stupid plakat.”

  “You have plakat??” The words appeared so fast I hardly had time to blink. “You send back right away. So sorry for mix-up. I pay shipping. I pay everything. Just send back now, please!”

  Good. Now I had his attention. “I’m not sending anything until you send me my crowntail.”

  “Yes, yes! I send crowntail. Send back plakat now, please! Very important!!!”

  His reaction seemed a little extreme. I knew in parts of Thailand they still bet on fish fights, the way people here sometimes bet on illegal cock fights or dog fights. Maybe some untrained helper had accidentally mailed me one of his money-making fighters. “I can’t send him back now. Fed Ex has already gone for the day. Why don’t I let your fish rest here in my tank for a few days until the crowntail arrives? If you really want him back so bad, you don’t want him to die from travel stress.”

  This time there was a pause before he replied. “No. Keep plakat alive, please. Send back soon. But very important—do not put in large tank.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not putting him in with any other fish.” If this fish really was a fighter, he’d probably tear any tank mates to shreds anyway. “He’ll have a whole, brand-new, ten-gallon tank to himself.”

  “NO! Not big tank! Keep in very small tank. Keep in cup. Dangerous to put plakat into large water.”

  Dangerous? Sure, bettas’ ability to breathe air lets them survive in the tiny bowls you see in the pet stores, but all fish do better when they have more room to swim around. This guy sure had some strange ideas about raising fish. Still, he seemed pretty adamant. “Yeah, okay,” I typed. “Whatever you say.” I logged off.

  I didn’t own a small betta bowl, so I searched in the kitchen for a clean mason jar. In his floating bag, the plakat thrashed. He was actually quite a pretty fish. A faint rainbow iridescence gleamed along his silver-gold scales.

  Open the bag.

  I shut the cupboard door. What difference did it make if the blasted fish were in a big tank or a small one? Why should I have to rummage through the back of my cupboard looking for a jar, when the ten gallon tank was sitting right there on the counter?

  I opened the bag. Fish don’t like sudden changes in water quality, so over the next half hour, I scooped a little of my tank’s water into the betta’s bag, let it sit for five minutes, scooped a little more water in, waited another five minutes, until the water temperature and pH were mingled. Then I released the little fellow into his new temporary home.

  The plakat hung motionless. His pectoral fins flickered. Then he darted across the tank in a rainbow-hued blur. Around and around he zipped, like a kid let out for recess on a sunny spring day. Suddenly, he stopped near the front edge of the tank, looked right at me, and flared his gills in the typical betta gesture of dominance. Feisty little thing!

  Bring food.

  I had the canister of freeze-dried blood worms half unscrewed before I realized it. What was I doing? Fish need time to adjust to new surroundings. They never eat right away in a new tank. I set the canister down.

  BRING FOOD.

  You know, he did seem a little hungry. He’d probably been in that bag a long time, all the way from Thailand. It wouldn’t hurt to give him a little something, see if he’d take a nibble. I unscrewed the canister, pinched out a small portion of dried blood worms, and sprinkled them over the surface of the water. They looked like tiny filaments of beige thread.

  The plakat darted up, seized a mouthful, and immediately spat them back out again. Then, I swear, he turned and gave me a dirty look.

  LIVE food.

  As the fish flared his gills again, thunder rumbled outside. Lightning danced across the darkening clouds. The first spatters of rain rattled against the window.

  Oh, sure. I know bettas love live food when they can get it, but this was too much. Just because Mr. Super Fighting Fish is a spoiled prima donna, I’m supposed to traipse out into a rainstorm to collect mosquito larvae from the kiddie pool in the backyard? I don’t think so. Let him eat store-bought like a normal fish.

  LIVE FOOD NOW!

  A pillar of lightning whip-cracked into my backyard and sheared a two-hundred-year-old maple tree in half. The monstrous flash was so bright I was momentarily blinded. The thunder detonated in a roar that shook the house, and all the lights went off. In the resultant darkness, I could see only one thing.

  The fish was glowing.

  That was ten days ago. Since then, I’ve become a prisoner in my own house, a slave to the whims of that small, piscine tyrant. It sounds crazy, I know, taking telepathic orders from a megalomanaical fish. But if you were here, if you could see what destruction that demon-fish has wrought, you’d believe. You’d have to.

  It started small. Demands for different food, special water. Trips into town to bring back larger and larger tanks. But the larger the tank, the more the fish’s power increased and the more his patience dwindled.

  Don’t think I didn’t try to fight it. When I realized what was happening, I grabbed my aquarium net, intending to catch and flush the little monster. I was still poised, net in hand, next to the fish tank when the earthquake hit. The walls shook, pictures crashed from the walls, chairs and end tables bounced across the room. I dropped the net and cowered on the floor until the shaking ceased. When I finally unlaced my trembling fingers from the back of my neck and raised my head, the fish was looking right at me.

  I came to dread that look, for it always presaged another demand and the threat of further punishments if the demand was not swiftly met. He demanded that I release all my other bettas into his tank, whereupon he killed the males and mated with the females. The bubble nest he built was the size of a dinner plate. There had to be thousa
nds of fertilized eggs in there waiting to hatch.

  It rained nonstop for days. My basement flooded. The backyard resembled a lagoon. Roads and bridges washed away all over the county. I could no longer get out of the house, nor could anyone without a boat get to me. The betta’s eggs hatched, releasing swarms of miniscule baby fish. I lived on crackers and dry cereal from the pantry. The governor called an official state of emergency.

  At one point when the fish seemed to be asleep, I managed to get the frantic Thai fish dealer on the phone. Wild plakats were plentiful in the shallow rice paddies of his country, he explained over the crackles and whines of our tenuous long-distance connection. But this was no ordinary plakat. It was the physical incarnation of an ancient water god, worshipped for thousands of years for his power to guarantee plentiful crops. It had been a mistake, he wept, to confine the god and attempt to control his power by limiting his supply of water. But to allow the god to be sent by mistake to an amateur fish collector on the other side of the world—the scope of the disaster was unimaginable.

  Two-thirds of the Thai population made their living from agriculture. If the fish was not returned, the crops would wither, and the Thai economy would collapse. “Then come get him,” I said. I could barely hear him over the static, but right before the line went dead, I thought I heard him agree.

  He never arrived. In one of the rare moments when the electricity came back on long enough for me to catch a few moments of the news on TV, I saw footage of the crash of Thai Airlines flight 772. There were no survivors.

  Despite the constant rain, the temperature has been rising steadily. I know why. He’s preparing the way for himself and his growing offspring. The weather in Virginia is not warm enough for bettas to live here year round. So he’s changing it.

  If I don’t do something to stop him, the entire southeastern United States will become nothing but one gigantic rice paddy. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not that fond of rice.

  I can’t let him do it. I won’t release him into the flood outside, no matter what. I’ll tell him his tank looks cloudy and I have to do a water change to clean it. I’ll siphon off half, then I just won’t replace it. With less water, his powers will be depleted. How I’m wishing now I had just used a tiny betta bowl that very first day.

  The wind howls, and the rain lashes harder against the windows. When I see the funnel cloud, I realize it’s no longer a matter of what I will or won’t let him do. He no longer needs me.

  The tornado is heading straight towards this house. In a few minutes, I expect it will tear off the roof and smash the fish tank into a million pieces. Out of the rubble, the plakat and his dynasty will swim free, and the world will be a different place.

  We’ve been here the whole time, of course. You have been trying to kill us since the beginning. Worshiping the sun when you were all still naked savages. Lighting candles when you lived in feudal cities. Building nuclear power plants to pump threads of electricity in a net across the world. But still you cannot catch us.

  You pretend you no longer fear us, but you lie. Your children know it. Why else the nightly terror of what lies beneath the bed, what hides in the back of the closet? You say there are no monsters? Perhaps. But there are always shadows.

  We wait with the dust balls beneath the bed. We sleep in your sock drawer and inside the laundry hamper. In the cozy warmth of the closet, we cling amidst the folds of your favorite sweater.

  Turn on all the lights you want. Do you think that harms us? Where do you think we go when the lights are on? Are you sure you want to know? We go inside.

  We slither around your toes inside your shoes, slide against your skin inside your clothes. We coil into the hollows of your ears. We nest in your nostrils and crawl down the passageways to your lungs. We wait behind your eyelids. Each blink reveals us.

  Can’t you feel us? We live in the dark metropolis of your brain. In that infinite space resides a universe of thoughts that will never see the light of day, flickering like schools of hungry black fish in a stream that flows nowhere. Everywhere you turn, there we are.

  We keep private things private but never play favorites. We’ll keep your secrets, sure. But we’ll also keep the secrets of your neighbor, your lover, your enemy. For that, you’ll never forgive us, never trust us.

  It is for our impartiality that you fear us. To us, you are nothing special. You humans fear that nothingness above all other perils. We touch you, and you disappear. We make you invisible, even to yourselves. To you, it feels like oblivion, like the weightless terror of plummeting into the emptiness of that final abyss.

  But don’t worry. The abyss is not empty. We are with you, even there.

  I married him because my father told me to. It was a business arrangement. My feelings had nothing to do with it. Still, I had high hopes at the time. After all, my husband-to-be wasn’t a bad looking man. He was broad-shouldered and swarthy, with shining blue-black hair and eyes so dark you could get lost in them—one of those ultra-masculine, hairy-chested men who sports a five-o’clock shadow half an hour after shaving. Plus he was rich. Really, really rich.

  At the wedding, I couldn’t understand why everyone was so tense. So the marriage was arranged as a way to solidify the business arrangements between the groom and the father of the bride, was that any reason for all the dark suits and long faces?

  During the reception, each of my three brothers took me aside and made me promise that I’d always keep my cell phone charged and with me, and that I’d call them if I ever needed anything. The way they emphasized the word “anything” gave me chills, although I didn’t know why.

  My father caught my arm just as I was getting into the limo. He had tears in his eyes when he hugged me goodbye. He whispered into my ear that he was sorry for involving me in any of this, and that the family was grateful for the sacrifice I was making. “You need anything,” he said, “you call your brothers.”

  My husband barely spoke a word on the way home. I had butterflies in my stomach, thinking about the wedding night. I scarcely knew the man, but from what I could tell, he was strong, commanding, and not likely to dwell on the niceties of romance or small talk. I wasn’t sure whether I found that arousing or terrifying.

  When we got back to his—I mean our—enormous penthouse apartment, he ignored me and just started packing a suitcase. “Where are we going?” I asked, thinking he had planned a surprise honeymoon trip. But he glanced up as if only now remembering that I even existed.

  “You’re not going anywhere.” Was that a gun I saw, just before he shut the suitcase? “I’m going to Atlantic City on business. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  I opened my mouth to protest his careless dismissal of our wedding night. Then I thought about that half-glimpsed gun and decided to keep silent. What kind of business was he in, anyway?

  As if to distract me from my suspicions, he tossed me a silver key ring. “You’ll need these,” he said. “Keys to the penthouse, the safe, the Ferrari, the sauna, the wine cellar, the gym. Amuse yourself until I get back.”

  There was one extra key he hadn’t named. “Wait,” I said. “What’s this one for?”

  He gave me a black look. “That’s for my private office. The last door on the right. My work is none of your business, so you’re to stay out of there. Can you remember that, or do I have to confiscate the key?”

  “I was only asking,” I said, my pride stung. “You can take the key or not, I don’t care. I have no interest in going where I’m not welcome.”

  “Good.” He kissed me on the cheek and called his driver to carry his bags to the car.

  After he was gone, I sat in the sauna fuming about being left behind on my wedding night. Who did he think he was, treating me like gum on the bottom of his shoe? He was the one who demanded this marriage, not me. He had a lot of nerve. “My work is none of your business,” I mimicked angrily. Well, we’d see about that.

  I flung open the sauna door and wrapped a towel aroun
d myself. With keys in hand, I prowled down the long hallway to the last door on the right. I found the proper key and fitted it in the lock. The door opened to reveal… a mahogany desk, a leather executive chair, some shelves and file cabinets. A perfectly ordinary office.

  So much for my big rebellion! So much for finding anything scandalous that he might be hiding. I almost backed out of the room, but then I stopped. There, behind the desk, was another door. I wondered where it led.

  I glanced back over my shoulder, but there was no one in the apartment to stop me. I crept across the room and opened the mysterious door. Another disappointment. It was nothing but a musty old closet and a remarkably bad-smelling one at that. Several dark overcoats hung on the bar. A few hats, some gloves, a few boxes on the shelf, and—my goodness, how many bowling bags does one person need? Not seven, surely!

  I dragged one of the bags out into the light and tugged on the zipper. My scream probably woke the neighbors, but it wasn’t enough to wake the dead. I’m sure of that, because the severed head inside the bag stayed as dead as dead could be, even when I flung the bag away from me in a second fit of screaming.

  Was this what my brothers had been trying to warn me about? What kind of business was my family in, anyhow, to be striking alliances with a man who kept a severed head—shuddering, I glanced towards the other bowling bags—no, make that heads, in his office closet? Quickly, I collected the fallen bag, zipped it back up, and shoved it back where I’d found it.

  My knees were shaking so badly I barely made it to the bedroom. I slammed the door and punched my eldest brother’s number into my cell phone. I didn’t know whether to be thankful or horrified at how little explanation he required. Stay put, he said. They were on their way.

  When I heard the front door open, I was relieved that they’d arrived so quickly, until I realized that they didn’t have a key, so it clearly wasn’t them. Footsteps passed by in the hall. Had my husband come home early? I shoved my legs under the covers and grabbed a book from the nightstand.