Fish Out Of Water

Once upon a time a little fish lived in a little pod in a great big fish city.

You may be thinking that this city was underwater but you would be wrong. Strange, but true. You see our particular little fish, Harriet, was a fifth generation land dweller and so she had lost all knowledge of living in water.

Let me tell you a bit about her life. Harriet woke up at dawn each day to give herself much time to prepare and to maintain her simple existence. She needed to eat ten oxygen bubbles and comb down her gills and strap them away as society did not really find gills acceptable to leave uncovered. Then she checked her pod for leaks because sometimes a strange, dangerous and unknown substance called water would seep in through any cracks.

Next she did her morning exercise routine that helped her fins to endure the hard work of the day. Walking on land demanded a very different type of strength, especially as the oxygen bubbles were expensive and she could only afford the minimum amount needed to remain alive.

Harriet then checked her enormous sun hat for any tears or holes because direct sunlight on her scales would scorch and burn and dry her out. She massaged her whole little fish body with special sun-blocking oil. Then she packed her lunch to take to work, a tuft of moss and a juicy worm from her tiny pantry that she tucked into an envelope to make it easy to carry.

City fish did not use water for anything. In fact water was the stuff of nightmares, an entity to be feared and shunned. She had been taught this in the most strict manner possible that instilled a hearty repulsion to anything aqua.

After setting her pod space to rights Harriet slid her tail fins into slide shoes, put on her sun hat and paused for a moment before she joined the city fish in the commute across the decks. She found this so exhausting and so disheartening. Sometimes, in her wild little fish heart, she admitted to herself that she was not enjoying life very much at all.

Today Harriet paused for a moment longer than usual. She had found two small leaks in her pod and fixed them up well how she had been taught to do. But she had accidentally touched the water that trickled in and instead of being burnt by it as expected she had laughed aloud at the utter joy of the beautiful sensation that it gave her.

“Oh dear. How could this be possible?” she thought. “I must be going mad with that madness that I have heard about, when fish contact water and become ridiculously impossible to be with anymore and then need to be taken to the mental clinic!”

Harriet had never seen any fish return from that clinic now that she thought about it. This disease must be really bad.

She gazed about the small space in which she lived, alone. Lonely. "Well, at least I shall be with other fish for the day." She told herself this every day to make her heart a little lighter, but honestly Harriet was quietly dying inside, starving from the inside of her soul.

Today was no different. She made her way slowly and cautiously to work where she packed oxygen bubbles for dispatch throughout the city. She found the work tiring and endless with no hope of any change or any reprieve. When she took a holiday to recover her strength from the sheer effort of living, all she could muster herself to do was to lie on her little bed and sleep the days away.

You may have realised by now that this was the most dystopian life possible for a little fish. Struggling to live a life that was so utterly unnatural for her, adopting many practices, exercises and habits that gave her the courage and strength to simply get through each day, with no thought in her pretty head for anything other than surviving…

And yet Harriet’s little wild heart could not forget that water made her feel well and truly alive!

Over the next few days Harriet began to ask quiet and seemingly harmless questions about what happened to the fish who went to the mental clinic, who had ‘lost the plot’. She began to take more note of chatter around her, and to remember the stories and myths and legends about the fish ancestors who had crawled from the ocean. In the legends the ocean was toxic and they needed to escape, and Harriet believed as the whole of the fish city did that they were the surviving descendants of these brave pioneer fish.

But after a while Harriet began to think more deeply and watch more closely. Where did the huge payments for the oxygen bubbles go? Why were oxygen bubbles not freely available for everyone, as they needed them to stay alive? Why was she paying toll to walk across the deck each day? And why was it so downright hard to keep on living and breathing and holding this whole impossible life together? Did any other fish feel the same way? Was she just crazy?

Well, thought Harriet. Something is fishy about this business. But she did not know who to speak to or where to look for answers without being carted off in a straight jacket so she kept her head down and followed her own quiet investigations about water.

She soon had a very risky brainwave and that was to allow a leak to leak! What if she was to capture some water and study it? That would be interesting, and so she did.

You can imagine that very soon Harriet realised that everything they had been taught about water was a lie. She allowed her little pod to leak so that a puddle formed big enough for her to flap her fins. Then her pod sank just a tiny bit, but enough for the leak police to notice.

They came and they interrogated her. She said that the leak was sudden and she did not know about it until she got home from work that day. The police gave her a strict warning, saying how she endangered the welfare of the city with such irresponsible behaviour and another infringement would mean her being detained.

The leak police patched and drained her pod and left Harriet very confused. What are they trying to hide? Maybe they don't know themselves…. Maybe they are also being lied to.

Hm. What does it benefit them to have me here, being afraid of water? And Harriet sat on her bed and thought and thought and thought until she nearly turned into a steamed fish.

When her thinking was done she thought that she knew why. This was not about her, about her life in this pod. This was about the whole big system that had been built on the backs of little fish like herself, who spent all their days and all their nights just trying to survive, to earn what they needed to pay to live.

Then all of that effort and all of the selling of the goods they made that kept them exhausted and producing the goods to sell to other fish to keep them broke, all of the money was going to the Big Fish, who were busy living in luxury and pulling all the strings like the police.

Well.

Harriet knew in her fish nuggets that she was on to something. Fish who went to the mental clinic may have been onto this too, which is why they never came back.

Harriet wanted to find out more about the Big Fish now. Who were they and what did they want?

Her scouting took the harmless form of celebrity watching, and she watched and watched them all until her eyes bugged out and her brain was too full. And yes, now she knew. Without the money that the city made for the Big Fish, they would be nobody at all. They would have no power, no control and mean nothing more than be just like other little fish.

Harriet kept on digging away, carefully uncovering helpful knowledge and insights. She read and researched and learnt all that she possibly could to understand about water, about how they had been separated and taught that it was evil, about what water could actually do for her.

One day Harriet learnt that the gills she was so ashamed of and hid very well were water lungs, used for swimming.

That was the first day ever that Harriet cried. She cried for the ache of separation, for a life of joyful easy comfort that could have been possible all this time, she sobbed for the pain and exhaustion and the grief of the life that she had lived so far…

Living a lie. A Big Fish lie.

After this discovery Harriet made up her mind that city life was over for her for real, and that she was going back to the ocean. She was terrified, because of all she had been told her whole life, in school, by her parents, doctors and religious teachers, her friends and employers.

But she had this instinct inside her, and a recurring dream of freedom, and she just knew that her little fish body was made to swim, to frolic and play in water, to dive deep when the sun was up and shallow when it went down.

Her fish nuggets knew it.

So she wrote letters to each of her friends and work colleagues. She told them all what she had learnt, and where she was going. Her journey back to the ocean was set, and she was going to find it and dive right in!

Now for you, it may seem obvious that this is - well - obvious for her to do. But she did not know if she would find the ocean, or be caught on the way, or if she was mad and water would kill her. So it was an extraordinary act of bravery and trust in her own heart’s whispers that she should do this at all.

One morning, before the sun rose, Harriet opened the hatch of her little pod and simply walked away. She had no idea where to find the ocean, but she guessed that if water was leaking into her pod then the ocean must be underneath. So she planned to keep walking in a straight line until she reached the edge of the city and the end of the deck and hoped that the ocean would be there.

Harriet kept on walking. She grew extremely weary, disheartened, questioning herself. She lay down and cried a little while, wondering if she should turn around and go back, give up this mad quest.

But then she knew that she could not do it, she could not go back. She knew that she would rather perish looking for the possibility of answers than live a life facing the long hopeless days of hardship if she stayed toiling for the Big Fish.

And then she noticed an unexpected thing. Getting through a hard day of work usually left her exhausted, spent, hopeless. Yet here, once her decision was made to press on she felt a strength and excitement and resolve that she did not ever dream was possible.

So Harriet pressed on, fuelled by what she did not know except the knowing that this was right.

*

When Harriet reached the ocean she was suddenly extremely afraid. She dipped a fin and closed her eyes….

And jumped.

*

Harriet wrote to each of her friends some weeks later.

She said, “Please come. The journey is long and scary, but I will tell you every step to take.

But please come.

I have found our True Home.”

The End... And the Beginning :)