Nishikigoi

Nishikigoi

Devin Bradley

In the early morning she asks you, “Doesn’t the Bible say something about raining frogs?” 

The weather forecast calls for rain and the sky billows with an armada of threatening gun-ship grey clouds. By early evening, when the first street light flickers on, the overcast heavens still loom and a fish falls from the sky. It lands with a thud that nobody hears. Nor does anybody else, that you know of, see it happen. People don’t pay attention to the single droplet, they only notice the flood. And by then it’s too late.

You saw it, just as you finished cooking dinner. You also dismissed it. One solitary fish, a gift from the heavens that slowly becomes something playing on an endless loop in your mind all through dinner. She finally asks what’s wrong as both your forks clink one final time against the table. You lean in to kiss her under the glow of taper candles reflecting off dirtied white dinner plates. What could have been a beautiful moment becomes forced because the lone silhouette of a fish plummeting head first into the asphalt takes the place of longing and desire. Confusion and uncertainty are not key ingredients for passion, but it’s what fills the room leaving your appetite for her wanting. She does not seem to notice your lack, though you can’t be sure. 

Seconds after you pull away, she licks a piece of blackened grilled steak from the corner of her mouth with her pink grub-like tongue. You can see it pulsating, like a heartbeat, working until the fleck sticks to the saliva then disappears behind the stockade of her lips. Her chin juts out and quivers as her teeth slowly grind the fleck into an ashy mush. 

But something else catches your eye. Something big. Something outside the window. When you look back at her, full in the face, you don’t see someone for whom you are supposed to thirst, instead you see an earlier conversation where she asks about frogs. And a bible. And you kiss her again. More intensely. With more purpose. Hoping to forget that you’re distracted.

She tastes like salt and meat and vinaigrette salad dressing and you push yourself away slowly.  

She cocks her head sideways, wants to ask you something. An interruption pauses the question hesitating on her lips. Thuds reverberate on the roof and the house fills with heavy drum beats. She races from the table to look outside while you remain in your seat staring at a soiled tablecloth, saliva cleaned forks, knives pocketing bits of sawn ribeye. You’re no religious man, but you do know what will be seen beyond the window. The apocalypse. Dead bodies will fill the streets. Koi probably. That’s what fell earlier. 

“You have to come see this!” She says in a state of disbelief, her voice almost a whisper against the sound of bodies slapping against the roof and the lawn and the street. You stand up, walk next to her to peer out the window. And it is just as you had suspected. Koi. They fall like raindrops, a rainbow of flesh cascading down. Bright red, orange, yellow, white, hints of blue shone in the glow of the streetlight on just the other side of the lawn. Soon there is a layer of fish across everything. No longer is it so loud. The sound still carries, only muffled. Pick a spot to look out there and you can see as one fish slides over another until it finds a space that arrests the motion. They don’t flop, you don’t see any gills working to try and breath nonexistent water—by all rights they are dead on arrival.  As you look out the window, and not for the first time, you think about how wrong the weather forecast had been. 

 A car alarm goes off, then the shatter of glass. In one direction sirens can be heard, then from another direction, and another until the outside world is filled with the panic of ambulances and fire engines and police cars. Close by the screech of a car accident, the unmistakable high pitched thrashing of metal into something immovable at an accelerated rate. 

“That didn’t take long.” She says to you. 

“What do you mean?”

“It was so quite just a second ago. Seems like the world just decided to fall apart all at once.” 

“Do you remember this morning?” You ask her.

“The frogs?”

“Yeah.”

“I know, I was just thinking about that. Weird, huh?”  

The fish are still falling in abundance. 

She leans in close to you and you put your arm around her waist. Who knows if this is the start of the apocalypse, but now that it’s all happening, you’re no longer bothered by it. It’s not something you have to worry about because, well, it’s right there and somehow it just doesn’t matter. The front and back windows of your house are safe, thanks to the porches and the roof line covering them; the bedrooms, not so much. So you leave her side to grab some blankets, some pillows, and wrestle a mattress off the bed to be placed in the living room. You then close all the bedroom doors. 

The power goes out not too much later and the living room is awash in the glow of taper candles still burning on the dining room table. She can no longer see the colors of the fish and closes the curtain. She covers the mattress with sheets and then the blankets, lots of blankets because the heater’s not going to work and there’s no way you’re going out to gather wood for a fire. 

Fish continue to pummel the ground.

Together you clear the table. The option to light some more candles is brought up, but choose not to. As the storm rages outside, there’ll come a point you don’t want to see, best to let the ones left burn all the way down, until there’s nothing. 

“You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?” She asks you as you lay down on the mattress.

“Not like this.”

“You seem much less sidetracked, now.”

“There’s nothing left to get me sidetracked.” Then, as if right on cue, a window in one of the bedrooms shatters. The noise of the storm becomes fresher, louder, and you wonder how long fish can continue to fall from the sky. For over thirty-five minutes the koi have been covering the landscape. Bodies on top of bodies on top of bodies, continuing to stack.

Another window goes.

Already the smell had been seeping in through cracks in house you didn’t know existed, the same cracks that whistled when the wind had blown past the house. But the stink had been faint, at first, an unmistakable whisper from the carnage just beyond. A subtle reminder that dead fish, no matter how they arrive, will pollute the air after enough time elapses. But once the windows bust, the dumpster smell of discarded waste at a seafood restaurant floods the bedrooms and pushes from under the threshold, propelled by the force of the storm and the negative pressure the vacuum of the house created.

Her nose wrinkles while you wince at the sudden unmistakable presence of koi in the house. 

She’s looking at you. Laying on her left side with her head resting on her hand, she asks, “Did you know that koi are symbols of love?”

“I didn’t”

You lean over and she meets you halfway, and this time when you collide into each other there’s something there. No distractions. 

And suddenly, it’s quiet. 

Sirens still churn and horns are still blaring and people can be heard shouting. But even with that it’s so quiet. Calm. Beautiful. It almost feels unnatural for the fish to have stopped falling. Front doors are opening and closing and people can be heard talking to each other as they venture into the wasteland of koi. 

You don’t get up. She doesn’t get up. You stay on top of the covers and just smile at her, then take in a deep breath because you are at peace. There are fish outside and chaos and your nose wrinkles at the trespassing stagnant air that still loiters in the house. 

She giggles at your reaction then slowly closes her eyes.