The Carp's Proposition
by Emily M. Z. CarlyleThere once was a young girl.
That’s it. It’s enough to know that she was young – her physical and intellectual qualities are of lesser importance than is the pure distillate of her youth with all its implications. Great potential, poised, waiting to burst forth and flash dangerously, like a supernova; also apparent immobility, the sluggish disinterest shielding her like a rampart. Also, the other side of these defenses – the extreme cockiness and impertinence, which act like a moat, a quagmire where she alone is not lost.
She is a native of the land of youth, very private, mostly reticent. She keeps her own council and maintains her own traditions. This is why people call her savage and heap scorn on her or patronize her at the best of times, while secretly craving the key to the mysterious rituals that define her. It embarrasses the power figures of the world to admit that there is something they do not understand. All ye parents, teachers, priests and peers, shudder and abandon hope as you enter this misty domain of bogs and secret pathways.
As I said, there was this young girl, the mistress of her own uncharted domain.
She was sitting on the edge of the river, cooling her feet in the lazy, green current. She did not do this often.
She was just thinking that people are so often like a bunch of demented nurses armed with salt shakers, rampaging through a ward full of patients afflicted with open wounds and raw bedsores, and feeling pretty good about the comparison, when she felt something cold, smooth, and vaguely slimy press against the sole of her right foot.
She screamed and tore her feet from the water, then squatted and peered down between her knees: a bone-white, spectral fish about a third of a yard in length returned her gaze steadily. Its round mouth and black-pearl eyes were raised above the water, and two long whiskery tendrils trailed on the surface on both sides of its head.
“I am here to grant you three wishes,” the fish declared without further ado.
“Aren’t I supposed to catch you first?” the girl asked.
“Do I look like a goldfish to you?” replied the fish a trifle testily. “I am a Japanese carp, at your service,” this was delivered with a little nod.
The girl considered.
“What do you care about my wishes?”
“Listen,” returned the carp in a business-like tone, “Ever heard of the expression Carpe diem?”
“Yes,” preened the girl. She was at the top of her Latin class.
“Then carpe it, would you?” Miraculously, the fish still managed to sound polite and just a little weary; not unlike a loving but heavily overworked father. “You get a chance, you take it, dig? What do you care where it came from?”
Actually, I care very much, the girl thought.
“Now then,” the carp continued amiably. “What do you wish for?”
“We-ell,” the girl hedged. “What can I wish for?”
“Anything,” came the placid answer.
Goggle-eyes. “Anything?”
“Yup.”
“And I’ll get it, too?” This was spoken with rapidly stirring suspicion.
“Exactly as you wish for it.” The fish blinked at her like a grandmother who expresses concern for your weight, your grades, and your love life all in one breath while admiring your latest report card and plying you with cakes and cocoa, even though you’ve already explained that you’re full, you’ve got homework to do, and you couldn’t eat any more anyway.
The girl rocked back and forth on her heels, peering into the water between her knees. It was all very tempting, to be sure, but she was a thoughtful girl who knew that faith and doubt not only can, but often do, exist side by side.
“Come on, then.” The carp was getting impatient. “There must be something you want.”
“Oh, sure,” the girl said. “So many things. But…”
“Bu-ut?”
She groped for the right, bland words – she didn’t want to offend the carp outright and thus blow her chances completely, but she would also be damned if she wished for something sight-unseen.
“It’s just that… How do I know that what I wish for now will still suit me tomorrow or a couple of years from now?” She refrained from using the word ‘forever’ since she didn’t even want to try to think that far ahead.
The carp made a grimace the girl recognized, with some difficulty, as a smile. “You don’t,” it whispered exaggeratedly, like a ham actor. “That’s the thing.”
“Thing?”
“The trick. The fine print. That’s your payment, in a manner of speaking. You didn’t think my services were for free, did you? You get your wish now, and then you get to see how it fits you. Consider the gamble you’re making as a kind of extended payment plan, if you like.”
“Interesting system.”
“We learned a thing or two from the best credit-card companies,” replied the carp with consciously false modesty.
“Is that so? Well then, can I take a rain-check, think it over, get back to you later?”
“No!” snapped the carp, its whiskers bristling. No wonder they call them catfish, the girl thought idly. “I told you, it’s buy now or bye-bye.”
“Those mood swings of yours can’t be good for business,” the girl retorted. “You ever consider going to a fish shrink or shrimp or something?”
“Ha-ha, split my scales,” the carp shot back. Then it sighed like the used-car salesman who has just knocked 5% off the price of a car he is about to sell for three times its actual value.
“OK,” it said. “Tell you what, I’ll give you three little demos, how’s that? A taste of what’s to come – if you decide to come to your senses,” the last bit was spoken in a barely audible murmur. “Put your ear close to the water.”
The girl eyed the fish and the water suspiciously.
“Come on, it’s not gonna bite you.”
“So you say,” the girl muttered, but she put her ear close to the calm green surface, faintly redolent of stagnation.
What she heard deep beneath the undercurrents and the liquid calls of the placid river was the protracted, ululating call of the muezzin; the ecstatic screech of cymbals and the song of dervishes; the sonorous tolling of great bells, the honk of taxis and tinkle of rickshaws, the calls of the gondoliers and the squabbling of bargain-hunters and merchants in a thousand different markets; even the trumpet-calls of wild elephants and the lowing of dromedaries. She could feel the sandy wind on her face, the tartness of black olives in her mouth, and the smell of wool dyed a rich, deep red, strung out to dry across the narrow streets of a souk.
Her eyes widened with the wanderlust of youth. But she was a pragmatic girl after all.
“You’re crazy,” she told the carp. “I’ll never get a passport without my parents’ permission.”
“You won’t need one,” the carp explained with the patience of a martyr. “Just make the wish, and you’re there.”
“And what do you propose I do then? What will I do for food and lodging? Go live in a harem, perhaps?”
“If you’re worried about money,” replied the carp as chirpily as a fish can, “no problem. Put your hand in the water. Go on, have faith.”
She had some, and it was of no worse quality for being tempered with caution. She held her breath and plunged her right hand in.
In the green, wavering light below the surface, she could see as plain as day that a multitude of variegated jewels had materialized in her hand. They glittered in all their cut and polished geological glory.
Her breath escaped her and she withdrew her hand. Then she was only half surprised to find that her palm contained a few smooth, opaque pebbles and some smelly river mud, which oozed slowly between her fingers.
“Tricks of the light,” she said. “I thought you said you learned from the best.”
“We did,” the carp deadpanned. “This is just a demo. I did tell you the price.”
The girl leaned forward and rinsed her hand in the river.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she quipped. “After all, jewels can’t buy me everything.”
“So I’ve heard,” replied the carp dryly.
“Can’t buy me the moon,” the girl soldiered on.
“We haven’t discussed the amount.”
“All right then, they can’t buy me love.”
She was still leaning over the water as the carp lifted what presumably constituted an eyebrow.
“Don’t have to.”
The next thing the girl knew, a head shot out of the river, and kept rising between her knees.
She screamed and jerked back, lost her precarious balance, and landed on her haunches and elbows. Two strong hands plopped on either side of her as a lean, muscular young man rose out of the water and leaned over her predatorily. He was naked and covered with iridescent scales. His hair was thick, green and wavy, and when he smiled she saw that he had, not two, but four rows of tiny, sharp, pearly-white teeth, like a shark.
He had the most beautiful smile, but his hair stank of fish, and he dripped polluted river water all over her, so she turned her head away in disgust. His kiss landed on her cheek, cold and titillating, like a knife blade wrapped in silk.
“If you let him put his tongue in your mouth, he’ll give you the gift of breathing underwater, so you can go live with him,” the carp pitched in helpfully.
“Why would I want to live with an oaf who smells like a fishmonger and has even worse manners?”
She felt the young man’s body go rigid and tense. Glancing sideways and up, she saw his face, stretched taught like a gymnastic appliance, and wondered briefly what she could do if he hit her or worse. But he burst into tears instead, spraying her face with warm salty water, and promptly retreated into the river, as smooth as a serpent. His anguished wails blended with the susurration of the wind in the rushes at the water’s edge.
“Now look what you’ve done!”
“I’m sorry I hurt his feelings,” the girl said, “but he deserved it.”
“You know, anyone else would’ve had their three wishes by now and have done with it…”
“I don’t believe you!” the girl chipped in angrily, but the carp went on regardless.
“… but no-o, Little Miss I’m So Much Smarter Than Everyone has to go and make me give her demo-os, and then spoil it, too…”
“Look…”
“… as if I’m not overworked and underpaid already…”
“What do you want from me?!”
“I want you to make your wishes finally! Dammit! Come on now, no more demos, do it, right now! Do or die.”
The girl considered the carp for a few seconds, trying to gauge if the answer she was about to give would bring her into any immediate physical danger from the oh-so-powerful fish.
“All right, then,” she said finally. “Die.”
“Come again?”
“Thanks very much, but I’m not interested. You said yourself there are plenty of people dying for such an offer, so I’m sure you’ll make some of them very happy. Buh-bye now.”
“You!” The carp was so outraged it sounded like a clogged drain. “You ungrateful… After everything I’ve done! I offer you the world, and you… You deserve to fail, since you never listen to anything anyone ever tells you…” and so on and so forth.
Now, I will say this for the girl: she could hold her tongue when she absolutely wanted or needed to, but she would be damned if she took the kind of crap two-legged apes dished out for her on a daily basis from a lower-level vertebrate.
She leaned forward with a flushed swiftness that caused the carp to pull back a couple of inches.
“You don’t know anything about me! Now piss off before I send my cat after you.”
She didn’t stick around after that, and smirked as she imagined the carp beating a hasty retreat, for in all its infinite wisdom it could hardly know that the girl’s father was violently allergic to cats.
She was walking along a dozen yards away from the river’s edge, carrying her shoes and socks in one hand, feeling the dust and dirt sticking to her still-damp feet, when she heard a rustle of rushes and saw the young man with green hair and sharp teeth waving to her: “Hey, you! Come here.”
“Why?”
“I wanna tell you something.”
“So tell me.”
“Oh come on, what are you, scared?”
“I’ve heard stories about your kind. You like to call children and pregnant women and young girls by their given names, and then drown them so they can be your servants.”
“Well, I don’t know your name, and all I wanted to say was it was pretty cool what you just did back there, how you made that old fish scamper.” He laughed raucously.
“Thanks.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
A brief silence ensued.
“By the way, it’s true what it said, you know. About breathing underwater.”
“Yeah?”
“Uh-huh. You wanna?”
“Why, do you?”
“I don’t see why not. Besides, you’ll pay me right away, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
She considered it. He grinned and winked at her, and showed her his tongue, like any young man showing off might. His tongue resembled a thick fleshy leaf, bright green and shot through with thin veins of red. She imagined what it must feel like, cool and damp, though not necessarily unpleasant.
That night, after she’d soaped all over and rinsed twice under the shower, she filled the bathtub, lowered herself into it, and then stuck her head under the water. With a tremor of apprehension, her eyelids clenched tightly, she inhaled.
She inhaled, and then she exhaled. Then again. And again. And then she was breathing so fast that she started laughing. The tepid bathwater rushed into her mouth, and stung the tiny nicks and cuts he had left on her gums, tongue, and the insides of her cheeks.
She was still laughing under the bubbling surface when her mother knocked on the bathroom door sharply and asked why the hell she was taking so long.
© Emily M. Z. Carlyle
Emily M. Z. Carlyle’s story “He Tastes Like the Sea” appeared in the Haloween 2005 edition of Thirteen magazine. Another story, “The Walking Wounded” was featured in “Dead Men (and Women) Walking” (Bards & Sages, August 2006). Originally from Europe, Emily is a student of history, languages, and people, and currently resides in Maryland.