The Fish

—an excerpt—

To hear Eyre tell it, he already knew the Fish was Holy when he saw how large it was, and how it shone. It was enormous and flat, a Sea Thing washed up on land, glowing and blue, rippled and rubbery, majestic, dying. Like a pancake, he said, but bigger. He swears it was still breathing when he got there. He swears he saw. I won’t lie to you and say I don’t rage with jealousy. I wish I had seen.

He was lucky to be the first to find it. It had washed up on shore during the Night of Lanterns, in April, when the spring rains still howled up and down the coast, bleak and biting. I could picture him in his floppy fisherman’s hat, drenched to the skin, tying his broken fence-gate with rough rope as the wind tugged at his coat, insistent. The way he tells it, it was the dogs he saw first. Three wild things he let shelter under his porch when the winds got fierce. Only tonight they weren’t under his porch, shivering and chewing fishbones and slop from Eyre’s pail. He saw the three dogs nipping at something further down the coast, near the water’s edge, and went to see for himself.

To hear Leerja say it, Erye wouldn’t know a Holy thing if he found it in his morning oats. She says it was her who found it when she noticed how the dogs chewed its Flesh, blank-eyed and staring into the black night, drenched to the skin, caring not that their fur was soaked and the winds stung their eyes with its salt spray. They chewed and chewed, like the chewing was what they were made for. It was her who shoo’d the dogs and cut off a slice of the Thing to put in her fishpot.