The Fish

The water was clear and bright. After days in the shade, sunlight now cut through the rough surface, sending shimmering rays dancing across the rocky bed of the river, and illuminating the patches of bright green algae that carpeted the rocks of deeper, slower pools. The fish gained speed, then hurled herself above the water line, over the rocks that created a minor fall in the river. Above the water line, the fish did not notice that the land here held only a remnant of the forest. The riverbank was open, aside from a still-developing layer of shrubbery and the few remaining blackened skeletal trees that dotted the riverside. The fish didn’t notice any of this, of course. She had no awareness of the fire-scarred land or new life that was steadily reclaiming once bare soil. The fish did not know trees, only the rotting snags that were sunk into the deep mud of the riverbed. Those broad obstacles with jutting tendrils of wood that once offered her safety and protection but now served only to impede her progress.

She pushed ahead, moving steadily against the current. The sunlight illuminated the squirming bodies of larvae caught in the current. The fish felt, somewhere in the recesses of her mind, the almost-stirring of an extinguished drive-the urge to swallow them. That urge remained a whisper in her mind. It did not surface in her body, but she felt its absence as she swam past the would-be feast. She had once been a fish that ate larvae. Now, she was not. Simple.

She had, not so long ago, lived in the deep sea. Her lithe silver body pulling saltwater through her gills as she explored the dark depths, feeding on its bounty. Now, she fought her way upstream in the clear, saltless water. She remembered this taste- this fresh stream water and the heaviness of her body in its currents. She was getting close. She did not know how she knew this and did not wonder. But she was getting close.

She would soon make it back to the place her life had begun. There was nothing else for her. This was right; it was where she belonged. The fish was aware that this pull was a reversal of polarity- the same sort of tug had once compelled her down this stream and out to the sea. She had once abandoned these shallow fresh waters for the salty depths. At the time, the need to find the sea had felt all-consuming, and she believed she would never return to these waters. She had once raced down these eddies with the same fervor that now compelled her to throw herself up them. She had needed to leave. And now, she needed to return.

If the fish had been a human, this inconsistency would probably have bothered her. The presence of a prefrontal cortex would have compelled her to tie the arc of her life together as a cohesive narrative. As a human, she would have wondered if she should have stayed in the stream all along. She would have interpreted this dire pull as evidence that this stream, her stream, and perhaps the freshwater world in general, is where she had always belonged; she never should have left. She might have bemoaned her time in the ocean as a mistake. But the fish was not a human. She did not need to make meaning from this change in course. Her body knew it needed to find its stream now, just as it had once known it needed to leave it behind. She did not question it. She felt no compulsion to explain her drives or excuse their inconsistencies.

She curved to the left, moving across the current instead of up it for the first time in days or maybe weeks. She followed her nose, her taste, her internal compass across the broad river and straight up into a narrow stream that was feeding its waters. She was nearly there.

The minutes stretched into hours as she swam up, always up. She hurled herself again up a small fall and landed in a deeper pool. She circled here, knowing that any further would be too far. She swam low, her once-silver tail flicked red in her periphery as she skimmed the gravel on the stream bed.

Here.

The fish laid her eggs amid the small stones. She had never laid eggs before, of course, but her body did not need her to understand how it worked. Only to comply. And she had. She barely registered the large, red, hook-mouthed male that followed her to the site. She did not worry about the eggs. She felt no urge to oversee their development

The fish had been pulled to many different things in her life, to safety, to food, to the sea, to her spawning grounds. Each of these phases had been right until they weren’t. If the fish were a human, she might have known that she had different names at each stage. She was first a fry, then a trout, then a salmon, then, oddly enough, still a salmon but now a spawning salmon. As if she had been not one fish, but several. Each with their own unique physiology, behaviors, and motivations. If the fish had been a philosopher, she might think that this was not entirely true, but also maybe not entirely false.

Now, though, was different. If each stage had been defined by what she was pulled toward, what did it mean that she now found herself pulled toward nothing at all? The ever-present magnetic pull that had directed her life in all of its forms was gone. She was not pulled toward spawning, nor the open sea. Not even toward food. And as she felt the stilling of that constant tug, she understood that in a life shaped by one drive after another, she had reached the final destination, a complete cessation of want. There was nothing left to pull her. She tread water. Letting the current direct her as much as not. There was no direction her body wanted to go.

She did not die immediately, but neither did she suffer. To suffer is to want something to be other than what it is; she had ceased to want anything at all. So, she completed the last of her many lives as the fish.

If she had been a biologist, she wouldn’t have been surprised to find that she had yet one more form to take. As her body decayed, broke down, and was consumed, she became the forest too. The wildflowers and the trees. Even the flies and their larva. As a biologist, she could have explained the carbon cycle and the nitrogen cycle. She would have understood that much of her body, as a fry and trout, had come from this forest to begin with. And that now, after so many other lives as a fish, she had returned.