Sunsets and Silencers

Float

Edward goes into his son's room and looks at the fish as it swims in its tank. It is getting bigger. Not in a normal way. It is growing, but much more quickly than a normal fish grows. Every day, it seems, it is bigger. He notices it.

They bought the fish on a whim. The cat had run away and the boy cried for hours until they told him they would take him out and buy him a new pet. He said he wanted something that couldn't run away, something with no free will. The boy says things like this sometimes -- things that make Edward and his wife worry about him. The boy wanted a turtle, but when the man at the pet store mentioned keeping the lid on the tank, that an escape was possible, they looked at the boy and shook their heads, and he nodded back at them silently.

The fish is bright red with fins that puff up whenever it feels threatened. It drifts back and forth across the bottom of the tank, picking up bits of gravel and spitting them back out again. They have shown the boy how to pinch two or three tiny pellets of food between his fingers and drop them into the tank, have lectured him about overfeeding it. They've told him the story about how a house sitter once killed their fish by overfeeding them. The fish were floating at the top of the tank, bloated and pale, they said. The boy promised he would never feed the fish too much. They watch him sometimes when he doesn't know it and notice how careful he is, how precise, counting out pellets and dropping them one by one onto the surface of the water.

Soon they are buying a larger tank. The fish is the size of the boy's fist, round and buoyant, and it bobs happily around the tank like a bathtub toy. Edward watches it every night and wonders how big it will get -- if it will keep expanding and expanding until they are forced to put it in the swimming pool and then set it free in the ocean. He wonders, if it keeps growing, if it will one day try to move onto land. He reads that fish will grow to fit the size of their container, and decides not to buy another tank, no matter how much it needs one.

The boy turns over in his sleep, opens his eyes half way and groans. Go back to sleep, Edward says, I'm just checking in. The boy says he's been dreaming about the world being covered with ice. There were no fish or anything, he says. Nothing could swim because of all the ice. Edward smiles, says the word glaciers. A long time ago there was nothing but ice, he says. He wants to tell his son all about the world when it was under layers of thick blue ice, when things still swam, but you couldn't see them they were so far down underneath.

On St. Valentine's Day

She drowned in the deep end of an indoor swimming pool, a little girl, her mother's darling. Her hair was yellow -- not even blonde, but the yellow of butter and old bones -- and it streamed around her as she floated, tiny limbs outstretched as if waiting for a lover. Her mother found her that way, hovering on the surface of the water, a daffodil fallen into a pond. She came back after searching for a drink machine, the novel she'd left on the bedside table, extra towels, and there: a little dead thing, more like a drowned puppy than a girl of six, skin elastic and heavy, pink and white and yellow like a candy heart.

A little girl drowned in the deep end of an indoor swimming pool. Mother said wait until she got back, she would bring apple juice, but she wanted to swim right now so she lowered herself inch by inch into the water, the warm water that smelled bad but it was okay, she lowered herself and it was very, very nice. But she moved through the water and it got deeper -- then deeper until she couldn't touch the floor. She tried to go back, but she couldn't, and then it was over her mouth, her ears, her nose. There was no one there, and the little girl waved her arms, coughed, sucked water down her throat, chlorine burning. No one to help her, and when she screamed her mouth filled with water. Everywhere, water. Water forever. And then, it was quiet. Suddenly, like a movie theater when the lights go off. Quiet, and the little girl was warm. She could feel herself floating again, felt the water fill her lungs. Safe now. The little girl floated like a tiny soft feather on warm water and she tasted sweetness, honey thick in her mouth.

They didn't know it then, not until weeks later, but they made her that day -- Valentine's Day after sweet wine and strawberries, dark chocolate staining mouths and fingers and sheets. Valentine's Day in a rented bed, a city they would never visit again. They didn't know it then, but there she was -- after heaving and gasping, eyes rolling back in heads, after all that, she was left. She was there. A smell like chlorine in the room, a tiny vine inside, coiled. And after, they slept. And after, more wine, chocolates picked through, laughter. A tiny vine inside, growing larger. Months later, their yellow girl, like a daffodil or dandelion -- her skin soft as petals, smelling of butter. Years later, Valentine's Day in a city they would never visit again, and she floated, her limbs unfurled, waiting for her lover to embrace her.

Beth Couture is a third-year PhD student in fiction in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. She has work published in the Georgetown Review, and forthcoming in the Southern Poetry Anthology’s Mississippi volume, The Southeast Review, Rougarou, the Thirty Under Thirty anthology upcoming from Starcherone Press, and the novel A Language of Now, upcoming from Chiasmus Press. She is also the co-editor of Squid Quarterly, and is the associate editor of the Journal of Truth and Consequence.