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Sailfish.
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Aglow beneath the Atlantic moon, some demigod with a devilish, bicorn tail stands wondrously wide. Pinning crisp, fresh grass, he erects his silhouette on but a scythe blade’s two crescent corners, as though they were miniature anchors and not—*now that the light permits better vision*—tips of a tail. And of course they are scary tips, but if it were not for the midnight chill, the stance would almost appear comical—for it is so unfathomably unnatural the way a creature so huge should balance upon just two knife points and never waver by more than a quarter-inch. How acrobatic! On daggers, he breathes easy, as a storm’s eye blinks easy; ocean winds curl around him in a lash-esque manner, having fallen prey to his flowing, watery mane. And still, the entity wavers not! Howl hexes into tendon-mesh, winds, but you howl in vain. Your wrath but feeds salty linen; your curses but fill—half-mast down a cobalt spine—the beauty of him and his aquamarine sunrise. Fury is but full knots in a blue sail!
So then, *what is he?* He is not human; he is nothing so mundane. He cannot be.
…
Could he be, perhaps, a lone statue of old marble? Abandoned, possibly—possibly forgotten in a hedge maze’s overgrowth. Or do I truly marvel at a shipwreck, positively rotten, with twisted, luminescent muscles strangling the shimmery pulse of a mutineer’s sunken, oil lamp heart—dusted with mint moss, smooth to the touch, sowed feather-soft over a field of fibre that twitches for some grander adventure? Harvest is due; it is inevitable.
Now, what is one to make of this haunt, when its presence cannot be denied? When this heat grows too big for one’s set of bones? It is dangerous; he has veins harbouring the constant, fierce boil, and it drives a fighting desire that points a compass—neither in the northeast nor the southwest, and neither leftward nor rightward, not up, either—but *downwards* and *outward*, for now I see:
*He is born of the waves.*
The air should be too warm for ice; I warm it with heart-clenching fear, and am stupefied—transfixed—as arctic frost bites my toes in its ascending avalanche. It climbs so urgently that I no longer command my legs; they have surrendered with shameless eagerness! Not even my trusty fists respond—I am separate from my will; my body is—indeed and inconveniently—not my mind! And my voice is—*where is it? Have I–surely I’ve not lost my own damn voice?! My goodness, have it this way, then!!* The mythic creature approaches closer, salt-rapier drawn to my rib, and I cannot even *whimper*. Have I spoken too often and too frivolously? Is this fate semi-proportional to my sins?
*Oh*, he advances further. It will not be long before I am scaled whole. How, my sorry heart, how I so dread an undignified death! How I so despise a watery grave!
“Hello.”
…
By the stars, a word. *Speech*. Speaking! With perfect clarity, sweet cadence, and a set of…rather pleasant lips, too.
“What?”
“…Hello.” It. To me.
“What?”
What, indeed! I ask so well. I cannot realise what he wants of me, but I can understand this: whatever he wants of me, he *will not have*. What could I give him that he does not possess? Is he so greedy? Is he not satisfied with his mercury-polka kite? Does his platinum hide bore him? I hate to find him pretty; I hate to desire his saucer eyes of this marvellous yellow. They resemble lemons, or perhaps half of a large lemon—worked into the silver-rimmed sockets with a grunt, followed by a step-back-and-examine, then a head-nod, then another grunt, this one harsher—as the other half is jammed into the grey flesh just slightly too near the brow bone compared to its left lemon eye. Does this handsome beast have brows? He politely tips his slender bill to me, and I can see it does not have brows; thus, it must not have brow bones. I will have no need to pick cartilage out of my teeth when I suckle his pit-less lemons. Am I blushing wet, thinking of citrus textures?
…
…Heaven forbid.
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Blue Marlin
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There arises, from a seafoam top-down shower, his majesty in blue and of blue—a pillar, a shepherd to the sheepshead, a hart to the coral hind, and an icon to the cardinal whose robe burns scarlet as fiery testament to his blinding wonder—his grace *is* blue; his jaw is alabaster, *was* alabaster, now it slackens—and the sky kneels to stargaze his rosy, loose throat.
“Great evening—”
with this, the net is cast,
“—my shoal.”
And the Blue Marlin draws.
He draws, tight-throated, so close to his flock. He draws them into his sculpted, diamond underbelly; they vibrate in excitation, gills breaking as waves do around his sapphire staff—*Yield to me, won’t you*? and tides part around his spire with a white whale’s whimper. Burst the ropes; dry bodies heave in beached piles, filling bathhouses with briny steam, while a tiny boat sinks to vacant, forsaken depths.
“*My lovely friends, how magnificent you are.*” So sweetly the captain beckons, so fervent is his call; in a pool of sterling light, an extension of his mercury pulse—his lordship’s bow—dipping so low and so dear, drinks from the mercury fountain his young crew bleeds. It fills private cabins, threatening a dire fable—yet he stays on the waterline, afloat, pumping with rhythmic pleasure. His vessels are bewitched. They await his arrival; his larger cup recoils, tenses, and disappears into an odd harem that dwarfs its lover in size—he is, to her, a siren king to a serpent Goliath, and though he be but only half her proportions, her maidenhead will fall upon his iron.
He sings, breathless, over the sound of smooth stroking.
“*Out of men, come mountains—*”
The rest is chanted: *out of mountains, comes a mayor; he comes to you and for you, his love goes out to you.*
Indeed, the mayor climbs a mountain, and reaches that rocky peak. He arches—still hardheaded, still hardworking, still in motion—until a sharpness strikes him dorsal-first and he twists, yowls, drills the air open—and overcomes with his scepter so cyan and so spent. In the wake of sedimentary applause, he retires. Sprouting springs cry ecstasy as hope bubbles up in viscous, pearlescent streams, vivacious in their euphoria—before it rolls down the juncture of an upside-down trench, splattering flat against the magical sand. Awake and full, realisation sets in: the mayor propels the heart to act—but the flesh, he wrings dry.
…
At such, the rogue sail and I embark on a pilgrimage to find *elsewhere*.
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Elsewhere.
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Swordfish.
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He who manages the unmanageable has a snout so particularly long and flat, it performs as though it cannot decide between the precision of a sabre and the gravity of a broadsword, clean-thrusting its subjects who have little time to reckon with their abrupt, unsuspecting wound; before evisceration paints water red, he is swimming away from the dead. Before the death becomes a spectacle, fire is living in perfect harmony with wood, for he dwells exclusively in the abyss and leaves no visible trace—those around him are often at least somewhat blind—with pungent, cheesy irises buried in sandy flesh and sluggish un-blinking—which make them such quiet, blissful witnesses. For the executioner, this is ever so ideal.
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