Breadcrumb #665

MADELINE DILLON

I

The night she went swimming for the six glowing fish, the boy was already asleep. The river was nearby (similarly, sleeping), and the girl walked there. She was wearing her favorite accessories—calloused bare feet and wild hair made so by dirt and wind. The boy slept soundly as the girl walked out of their home.

It was small, just a single room, and yet they could not fill it. After the boy built the bed, it vanished, leaving nothing but air where the bed should be. The boy and girl slept there together each night, seemingly floating feet above the ground. The stove and refrigerator vanished, too. Then the couch, and then the bookshelves. Now the room is empty, though the girl bumps her wide hips several times a day. 

The girl left the boy sleeping in the invisible bed. Truthfully, as she walked toward the water, she was unsure what she intended to find in its depths. The water was shallow at first. She stepped in one foot at a time and the water lapped softly against her ankles. She wished, in this moment, that she knew how to dive so she could plunge herself into the dark river. Alas, she stepped in slowly until the water reached her neck. Imagining her lungs as latex balloons, the girl breathed in deeply until she thought they would pop, and keeping the balloons at capacity, the girl immersed herself in the black water. She writhed to turn her body upside down and her toes touched the night air through the water’s surface. Her arms were not strong, but she used them as best she could to propel herself deep into the river. 

“She wished, in this moment, that she knew how to dive so she could plunge herself into the dark river.”

When she opened her eyes, there was nothing but blackness around her. She remained still for a moment, noting that her heartbeat seemed to pulse the whole river. At first, she squinted with discomfort from the water against her bare eyes, but quickly became unbothered by the feeling. She had tied a knot on the balloons. Her vision adapted to the dark endlessness and even so, there was nothing to be seen. The girl began to swim through the emptiness.

The girl swam for what could have been several hours. Her arms and legs had slowed and she could not pay close attention to the darkness around her. She wondered if she would ever find what she needed from the river, when the girl saw something from a distance—the most beautiful thing in the world. The girl swam toward it with sudden vitality. It was a fish, she realized as she became close. The fish was tiny, the size of a fingernail, and glowing, as if her skeleton was made of platinum and her scales of rare diamond dust, pink and violet. She swam right into the girl’s hand and nestled there. The girl was so happy, she swam in circles. When she looked at her palm and the tiny fish making her home there, she saw still emptiness, and she began to swim again.

She felt like the sun would come up before she resurfaced if she kept at the rate she was going, but it remained starry and nightly as she swam, exhausted, through the dark water. After finding the first fish, the girl became certain there were exactly five more. She wondered how the boy was sleeping, if he was sleeping, if he was dreaming, if he was dreaming of her, if somehow he was dreaming of her six fish. Mostly she didn’t care, but wonder, yes. The second fish glowed blue. Sapphires and emeralds. The next four shone different colors: crimson and orange like a sunset’s reflection. Silver and gold like expensive jewelry. Bright white and lavender like lush rainy flora. Fuchsia and cerulean like a cautionary summer’s morning. The girl gathered each of them in her palms and swam with her legs, slowly and painfully to the water’s surface. 

II

fish (v). to seek to obtain, to look for

empty (adj). containing nothing

invisible (adj). ignored

III

When the girl returned home, the boy still slept in their invisible bed. 
There were invisible arrows on the floor.
They led to the invisible sink and the girl clutched together tighter her palms. 
As she reached the sink her hands led her to the invisible drain like magnets.
Each of the six glowing fish fell from her palms into the invisible drain of the invisible
kitchen sink.
The girl could feel an invisible pipe narrowing her shoulders and her wide hips. 
She felt her belly contort as she slid through the invisible pipe.
She fell to the ground. 

The boy awoke at the sound of her fall. As he looked upon her, he wondered if she would ever wake up. Then he wondered if she loved him, if she ever loved him, if she’d love him suddenly when she awoke. He wondered, at least. When the girl awoke and raised her head off the ground, she cried at her empty hands and the boy did not understand.

So she told him about her six glowing fish.
She told him about her aching arms in the dark water, how she swam for hours.
She explained the nothingness and how she was so deep she couldn’t even see the moon.
She told him about the first fish, rosy and regal, sparkling and serene in the nightly water.
She told him about the second fish, blue and bold, majestic and masculine.
She told him about the four fish who followed.
She told him about the arrows, how her hands and hips felt heavy with each step.
She talked about the inexplicable need to drop them back into the abyss where she had
searched so tirelessly for them.

The boy thought he began to understand so he said “I understand,” but the girl knew he did not. She knew he would never understand the feeling of the tiny fish in her palms or the feeling that they belonged to her and they always had. The feeling that the fish were somehow a part of her and she them. The girl felt her stomach muscles twist and she felt as if she could fall back to the ground. Instead, she rolled over in their invisible bed with her back to the boy. 

IV

The girl was lovely with her calloused feet and wild hair. She let it grow all over her body. She painted her lips with red paint and sometimes blue when she was feeling melancholy. She kept her fingernails short so she could pick her banjo and her mandolin. Mossy rocks made her smile, along with the twiddle of a flute, knots in trees, fertility, fullness, fish in palms.

The boy was at times aggressive. He often yelled with his lungs and sometimes with his fists. He said he would never dare hit the girl, and she believed him. Still, she watched everything he had made disappear into emptiness around her and she feared she would be next. He was a builder of anything he could eventually destroy.

But the boy listened when the girl spoke. He heard her and he often responded thoughtfully. The girl had always felt comfortable confiding in the boy. Then one day, the girl wept and the boy began to build. She cried and cried, so he hammered away until there were four wooden walls and a tin roof and two windows facing east and west. He hung her banjo on the wall and her mandolin too. He laid a woven rug before the western window so she could nap like a kitten in the warmth from the setting sun. He tried to find her red paint but the best he could do was clay from the river. The boy told the girl he had done something that would make her stop weeping. So he showed her the room he had built for them and for a moment, the girl did stop weeping. When she began again, he built them a bed to sleep on and again, she stopped for a moment. 

“Why are you crying now?” the boy asked the girl when her tears began again.

Soon the bed became invisible. Soon everything else did too. 

“I’ve an idea,” said the boy, as he began to feel further and further from the girl in what had become an empty room. So he tied a red string around the girl’s pinky finger and his own. Soon after, the boy snapped the string, swinging his fist into the wall.

V

When the girl turned to face the boy lying in their invisible bed, she didn’t find him next to her. She wondered where he had gone, but she mostly didn’t care. She wondered, at least. The girl walked slowly, for her belly still felt contorted, to the invisible sink and stared down its drainpipe. She willed the fish to return to her. She cupped her hands and watched them, invisible, in her palms. 

The boy returned, but he did not stay long. The girl let him hold her empty hands. She wept and the boy told her he understood, but he did not.

That night, the girl paced through the empty room before she returned to the river where she had swum so long in the darkness. She knew, of course, she would not find the fish again. They had left a bruise she intended to press for as long as it made her cry to do so. The girl swam so deeply that she could not see the moon. The water was so warm that she could not feel any tears. She let the emptiness fill the space around her, the void within her. She swam.

The boy said “Do not press on that bruise that the fishes left.” So the girl pushed even harder onto it.

The boy asked “Do you want me to hold you tonight?” So the girl told him she would press her back against their wooden walls. 

The boy asked “Do you even love me?” So the girl said “No.”

VI

The girl taped the red string into her diary and she moved from their invisible home. In her new apartment, the girl set up six fish bowls with fresh water and river rocks. When she stepped back to look at the bowls, she found herself dry-eyed and so the girl poured the water out from each of them and packed them away. 

The girl bumped her wide hips no longer. She feared not that she would soon disappear, and she found fullness where there had been none. She wept far less often at the pressing of a bruise though some nights she still swam in the river.

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