“My name’s Fish!” the girl says exuberantly, snapping me from my self-indulgent dream.
“Fish.” I test out her name. “I like it. Nice to meet you, Fish.” I hold out my hand, not sure if it’s the local custom.
She ignores me and turns to the sea. “Here they come,” she says.
In the sky above the waters an enormous blowfish plunges down from space, a massive planet-killing meteor, trailing vapor and smoldering with reentry fire. A crack opens in its face, a gargantuan mouth opening as it falls, as if it were a beast coming to devour us all. I grab Fish’s arm, readying to run, when I remember: this is no monster. This is a seed.
The blowfish slows as it swoops down, and the air thunders with its deceleration. For an instant it skims the surface, then eases its great mouth into the waters, scooping up megaliters, stirring up goliath waves. Now, belly full, it screams as it arcs back to the sky, mouth sliding closed, while cloud and spray and marine life flicker-flash in long tails behind it as everything that missed the cut tumbles back into the sea.
The blowfish wails as it speeds away, shrinking rapidly, off to the hell-bar-dos of thoughtspace and the Outer New, off to seed life on some distant planet’s virgin seas. The ship recedes until it’s too small to see, and when I awake from my stupor, Fish is gone. My hand holds not her arm, but a crumpled towel. Beside me, a dozen small footprints lead into the sea.
A creature has dug up my grave. A rat, a bird, a monkey, it’s hard to say. But, whoever it was, they left the lizard behind. Small red ants have gone to work dissecting it, and in the hot morning sun, its skin has turned to leather. I contemplate burying it again, but these local animals seem to have a better idea of what to do with it, so I leave it be.
Fish surprises me on the beach that afternoon. “I don’t get it,” she says.
I look up from my pad, unexpectedly happy to see her. “What don’t you get?”
“Why write novels at all? You could project your dreams into a neural.”
“I could. But dreams are raw and unfiltered. And that always felt like cheating to me. With writing, you have to labor over your thoughts.”
My words seem only to perplex her more. “But you could dictate your story. Why make it so hard?”
“You mean, why use a pen?”
She sits beside me, her violet eyes boring into mine. “Exactly.”
“Here,” I say, handing her a spare. I pull out an empty pad from my pack. “Try it, and tell me what you feel.”
She holds the pen like it’s a sharp knife; a long time ago, all pens were knives. “I don’t know what to do,” she says.
“Just press the tip to the page, and swirl it around.”
She gives it a try. Her eyes go wide. “Ooooooh, this is fun!”
“You’ve never scribbled?”
“Not with a pen.”
I let the sounds of her drawing and the gentle breaking waves mesmerize me into a memory: my daughter sitting in our kitchen one sunny morning, scribbling on paper; my wife, sanding down her wooden figures in the next room; me, listening to them work, feeling full, feeling complete. Eventually, I wander back to my pad and write:
Once, when they had lain beside each other on Oopre’s sparkling beaches to watch a parade of comets cross the sky, Ubalo had said something that had stuck with her across the ever-broadening gulfs.
“Can you imagine,” he’d said, “what the first person to come upon a grave must have felt? When he saw the disturbed earth and smelled the fresh loam? When his human curiosity led him to the inevitable discovery of a body intentionally laid to rest? Did he understand what he’d just found? Was this the first time a human knew the sadness of the whole race, that despite all our lofty, endless aspirations, we are finite, we have an end?
I reread what I’ve written and hate it. It’s too cerebral. It doesn’t drive the story. I tear off the page, crumple it, and toss it into the sea. Beside me, Fish has drawn the likeness of the blowfish gulpership on her pad.
“Wow, Fish!” I say. “That’s amazing!” I’m not just flattering her. She’s fantastic. Her detail is astounding.
“Nah,” she says, tearing off the page. She throws it into the sea.
“Hey! Why’d you do that?”
“I don’t know. Why you throw yours away?”
“Because … it wasn’t perfect.”
She squints at me, her violet eyes shining like lasers. Then she stands, drops the pad onto the sand, and hands me the pen. “I gots to go.” And before I can stop her, she saunters off down the beach.
An ankle-high wave washes her crumpled paper toward me, and I wade into the water to fetch it. The ink has bled, but the core remains.
Back at my bungalow, I spread Fish’s drawing on my kitchen table to dry. To my surprise, the running ink actually enhances the image, makes it seem as if the blowfish is leaping off the page into space.
Later, because I’m a masochist, I check my health. Five weeks, if I’m lucky. I’d better get cracking. Instead, I get drinking.
I was well into my cups last night before bed, so when someone knocks on my door just after sunrise, it takes me a while to rouse. When I finally open the door, Fish darts in and immediately gets a blood orange from the maker, plops on the couch, and says, “You made all them books by hand?”
“Still do,” I say, fetching keemun from the maker. I’m not yet caffeinated enough for conversation.
“But that’s so much work.”
“It’s also a ton of fun. I love the physicality of it, the smell of
