Strange Fish by Emma Eun-joo Choi
Managing editor T Guzman on today’s bonus short: Maybe this is you on a field trip with no friends and so many fish and so much to wonder. To feel towards a world shifting and changing faster than you can keep up. Emma Choi’s piece takes us there. Reminds us what it’s like to desperately want to be closer to someone even when we don’t understand. Especially when we don’t understand.
Strange Fish
I am nine. I am wearing a purple dress and a yellow hair ribbon I am at the aquarium with my fourth-grade class, here to learn about marine life and global warming. I walk near the end of the line of my classmates. I do not have friends.
These are facts of the memory. The things that don’t change however many times I turn the day over in my mind.
Another fact: the Baltimore aquarium hosts more than twenty thousand living organisms in its billowing tanks. More living organisms walk outside of the tanks, between walls of water - into a world of glass.
I am nine and my imagination is still untamed, running wild as I follow my class through the exhibits. I am a mermaid floating in the outskirts of the kingdom. I am a plastic bag drifting current to current on my way to the place where lost things go. I am something nobody has a name for yet—something to be discovered.
Something else in the memory, another fact of the matter: a feeling growing.
We stop in front of a wall of fish of every color swirling in a kaleidoscope of color and light. We crowd in front of the tank and Kayla and I stand next to each other and I can hear her breathing close to me. I look at the fish and the fish look back at me. I look away and they keep looking.
My classmates notice.
Look! The fish love Francis! Fishy Francis!
A sharp word from the teacher and they fall back into line. I can feel the teacher looking at me.
Kayla walks in front of me, her long blonde hair like sunlight pouring over her shoulders. I match my steps with hers, imagine my feet tied to hers so we share each space at the same time. Kayla wears a pink shirt and blue jeans and shoes that light up when she walks. She has friends. I am not one of them.
Walking now, walking through the blue light into deeper waters. Jellyfish pulse beyond glass in dark blue water. Kayla laughs and they glow in unison.
Walking now like walking towards something. Something at the end of the hallway that waits for me to arrive. As we sink into simulated sea I can feel each chamber collapsing behind me—doors closing off any path backwards.
The last room. Strange fish. It is dark like night and the air is quiet, like talking would rip a hole through the fabric of this world. Velvet water on all sides, every wall and the ceiling made of glass. Fish of fantastic proportions drifting all around. Circulating in one fluid direction. I wrap my arms around myself, hold myself in. Breathe. A glimmer in the dark glass as Kayla’s shoes light up as she walks. She is walking towards me. It’s so dark and nobody can see me but her. No one can see me see her but her. I watch in periphery as a mammoth, bulbous fish drifts up behind my shoulder. But Kayla is looking at me. She is looking at me. And she reaches out. Her hand touches my arm. And everything goes still and then everything shatters into water and light and strange fish swimming and everything with the fish.
Emma Eun-joo Choi is a fiction writer and playwright from Vienna, Virginia. Her work has been featured in Jelly Bucket Magazine and Cargoes and has been recognized by the Poetry Society and the YoungArts Foundation. Her plays have been produced Off-Broadway and reviewed by the Washington Post. She is currently a sophomore studying English at Harvard College. She spends her time doing improv comedy and crocheting weird blankets.
