“Those plastic bags look like they should have Goldfish in them!” PP exclaims as she watches DW dump another bag of water on the redwood slats of the sauna. She’s pissed off in a quiet way. PP can tell. She’s not smiling. She doesn’t chuckle at the Goldfish remark.
She’s still mad about last week and the Goo Blame Frenzy. This washing off of the redwood slats must be a reaction to whatever happened with the Girl Fight that PP and DL never quite understood.
Stalking out of the sauna, the now empty plastic bag clenched in her hand, DW barely turns around to wish everyone a good night.
Damn. There’s some bad mojo goin on still!
“Do you have fish?” DL ventures shyly, spying a sparkle of fish response in Smells Like Roast Chicken Woman. How DL knows this, PP can’t fathom.
Call it Fish Intuition.
“Why, yes I do! How did you know?” SLRCW beams, shifting her sparkling salt vault mass to avoid the dripping water from DW’s water cleansing festival.
“I don’t know,” DL murmurs, “I just saw something and….”
”I do. I do!”
”What kind of fish do you have?” PP asks, realizing that she’ll have no clue about the answer. Fish she doesn’t know. Ask her about cats and she can tell you every breed in the book. Tortoiseshells. Russian Blues. Rag Dolls. Himalayans. Abyssinians. Somalis.
But fish?
She’s about to find out about!
“I have me one Red Devil” Fish Woman chuckles, “he a Real Aggressive Fish. And I also have a bunch of Corrines….”
PP knows that she’s got the name of the second kind of fish wrong. She’s too focused on the Red Devil for godsakes!
“Does the Red Devil eat the other fish?” she asks.
“Oh, yeah, he do if He get HUNGRY. But I try not to let that happen. I give him lots of Pellets and Guppies.”
PP nods, stricken. Aren’t guppies the ones that turn into cute little frogs? Damn! Is the Red Devil worth sacrificing frogs for?
Evidently!
PP doesn’t know what the Pellets are, but it doesn’t sound like they’re alive. She hopes this is the first course of feeding, but has a feeling that the guppies might be the preferred delectable for the Red Devil.
And what does the Red Devil look like she wonders, now that she knows how evil he is cuz he eats innocent little guppies!
Well, duh, he must be red. And he must have horns. And he must have a big mean mouth with lots of deadly sharp fish teeth to munch up the poor little guppies.
Oh! PP can’t write about it anymore. It’s all too horrible. She sees the scenario now. The plastic bag filled with unsuspecting little guppies being poured into the aquarium and then the Red Devil swooping in and scarfing them down before they even have a chance to swim away. But of course they can’t escape cuz they’re in the goddamn fish tank, being terrorized by a Red Devil.
Hell, it’s as bad as driving down 880 in the 103 degree heat and having Big Rigs ram up on your rear end before swerving around you, leaving you in a cloud of putrid exhaust!
Later, in the shower, PP spies Fish Woman soaping up down the aisle from her and can’t resist asking, “What’s your Red Devil’s name?”
“Big Red!” she beams. “It just me and him! Just the two of us! That’s all!”
And PP has to wonder, what’s it like to be a Fish Woman who comes to the Y, salts up for hours in the sauna telling stories of her Red Devil and then going home to her Big Red at the end of the night?
It might be just fine.
If you’ve got a little bit of the Devil in you.
Which, PP is certain, Fish Woman does.
3 comments:
This is Red Devil Weather if you ask me! That big fish must be in fish heaven with this purgatory-type weather. Pool Puss, I believe that you have the ability to get anyone to talk about her life. That's a gift, indeed!
Sort of conjures up a vision of a Red Fish Devil with a Mermaid riding it….might be fun…
My 2 cents here. Tadpoles turn into frogs.
Guppies are small fish yes, and some people keep them as little fish bowl pets too. So feeding them to the Red Devil sounds like feeding mice to pet snakes... sheesh, people and their pets!
But wait, we feed fish to our cats, although straight from the can so we don't have to think of them as victims. But if out cats could, they would greedily paw the guppies out of the bowl and gobble them up too, so...
Life is just a bowl of f*ing cherries, as the wise one says. Or maybe life is just a fish bowl and watch out for that Red Devil with the big kissy lips?
Oh PP, you are the wise and insightful one.
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