Fish of Disease

The whole world was flooded and dark. Even indoors, the water almost came up to my knees. The sky was covered with thick yellow clouds, making the whole world look jaundiced. The clouds hung low, obscuring the tops of street lamps.

Despite the reduced sunlight and the water, it was comfortably warm.

Everyone in my family was wearing khaki safari outfits, complete with pith helmets.

The second story of our house was flooded, too, but the stairs weren't.

The water was muddy and foamed easily, making clouds of yellowish foam whenever something moved.

There were also enormous fish. They were each about the size of a human, except a little shorter and thicker. Most of the fish were a bright orange, but a few were colored like koi. They swam around freely, their tops peeking out of the water.

Outside, the fish would jump as high as a house, sometimes over houses and into the river that was a parallel street.

My sister Matie was trying to tame a fish. She'd found a really large one that was big enough to ride, and that's what she wanted to do. She was trying to get it to recognize her and come closer, so she was feeding it bath beads. The wisdom of that may seem dubious, but it seemed to be enjoying the bath beads. She would send one half-skipping, half-floating towards it, and it would rear its enormous head out of the water and grab the bead.

The flood had unhinged some people down the street. They wore long and tattered robes that had obviously started life as sheets. The robes dragged in the muddy water.

There were a couple dozen of these cultists living in the Catholic school a block down the street from my house. Specifically, they were living in the playground. It was surrounded by chicken wire fencing, with two gated doors, so there were no fish within. The cultists chanted monotonously nearly all the time, led by a fellow sitting on top of the tallest slide.

They had a ritual to perform. There were a lot of horrible diseases going around, ever since the flood. So they all stood in a semicircle inside the compound, legs far apart. Two cultists stood by one of the doors in the fence and opened it when a fish came near. Once the fish came in, they would close the doors again.

The fish knew what they had to do. Each would swim towards the chanting group, whose chant escalated as the fish approached. The fish would circle for a while, then swim through the legs of a devotee. There would be a flash of light, and the chosen one's skin would appear in an iridescent rainbow of scales. The fish disappeared, but the chosen cultist's eyes were bright and they seemed more purposeful.

This went on until all but one of the chanting group had received a fish. I think they did it in shifts, so the people at the gate were taken care of already. Finally, only one cultist remained, unfished. The group joined hands in a circle around him, and the chant became more singsong. They danced slowly around the odd man out. The group's faces showed a state of bliss, while the middle cultist looked sad and embarrassed.

The fish-cult reject in the center slowly and determinedly opened his tattered robes and found a small, semicircular craft knife, the kind that fits in the palm of the hand. It looked like an artificial snail when he clicked out the blade. He began to make short, practices incisions in his skin. There wasn't much blood, but soon he could fit his hands under some skin flaps. He loosened and stretched them, then cut them off. They fell unceremoniously to the water, where they floated like orange peels.

The skin was coming off in saucer-sized chunks randomly spaced. The cultist wasn't cutting below the waist or above the neck, but he was managing to also skin his back. The muscle was showing through; it was something to watch it flex.

Soon he was more holes than skin. The group circling him moved in and started collecting the skin flaps that were floating in the muddy water. They seemed to know where on his body each flap went. They put the skin pieces back in the holes, and then one of them glued them back in with what looked like a tube of pink toothpaste.

The man now had dirty spots on his torso, ringed by pink paste. Later on he would get sick and the replaced flesh would bulge out with pus and dirty blood.