Red Dot Irreal by Jason Erik Lundberg Read Free Book Online Page A

of her sons, or her best friend from junior college, had asked her to eat them. She wasn’t sure when she had crossed the threshold between considering the fish a fish and considering it a friend (regardless of species), but there it was. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
    “Please, auntie. Consider it my deathbed request.”
    Mrs Singh exhaled. “Very well.”
    “Hey, Ma,” Vishal said, poking his head into the kitchen, “orders are backing up. You talking to that fish again, ah?”
    “Never mind, you,” she said, and turned back to the task at hand. Vishal couldn’t hear the fish, and teased her for holding conversations with it, but this just went to show that his big head wasn’t all filled with smarts. Mrs Singh kept her head down and concentrated on producing the best food that she was capable of producing, which was, after all, all anyone had a right to expect.
    The afternoon passed quickly, and at 2:30, she served her last customer, having exhausted her pescetarian supplies for the day, excepting a few errant vegetables. She and Vishal thoroughly cleaned the stall, scrubbing down every visible surface, and some that were not; Mrs Singh took pride in her cleanliness, and in the “A” rating that her stall had received from the government, one of the few in the whole hawker centre. She made a list of ingredients for Vishal to pick up in Little India for the next day, and he tucked it into the pages of the book he was reading, a short story collection by a science fiction writer named Vandana Singh (their shared surname was common enough that she hardly took notice of the coincidence). He kissed her on the cheek and then walked off to his motobike; Vishal was such a good boy, even if she didn’t always understand him. She hoped he’d meet a nice Indian girl and be happy like his elder brother Anand.
    Once he was out of sight, Mrs Singh stepped back into her stall and closed the segmented metal gate with her inside. She looked to the aquarium, hoping to have one final conversation with her friend the talking fish, but he had quietly stopped moving and now floated upside down in its tank. Her eyes began to water, and she swiped at them with her fingers. She could cry later; she had work to do. Mrs Singh reached up and gently lifted her dead friend out of the water. She scaled the snapper, gutted it, and cooked it whole in fiery curry along with fingers of okra and slices of eggplant.
    With the first bite, she experienced a heightening of all her senses. The normally drab concrete and stainless steel of her food stall exploded with colors and textures she couldn’t have imagined possible. The flavors of the fish’s flesh and the curry itself filled her mouth, her sinuses, rising up to the top of her head, the ultimate fish, the apotheosis of fish. She could taste the Atlantic sea water of the fish’s original home in the Gulf of Mexico (it was thankfully caught before the cataclysmic oil spill there), the small fish and crustaceans on which it fed itself, the silt that was filtered through its gills. She could hear each individual conversation on the other side of her stall’s gate, each intake of breath, each clattering of flatware on melamine plates, all as if it were right there in the stall with her. Her world expanded, as if she were experiencing reality through a wide-angle lens.
    With the second bite, she gained understanding of the speech of plants. Combined with her augmented hearing, she could detect faint laughter as a breeze rippled through the bushes in a park nearby, the harrumphing discontent of various old angsana and palm trees, the shrill excitement of tridax seeds adrift on the wind. As well, the echoes of sad resignation from the okra and eggplant she had employed in this curry, and, she assumed, in all the dishes she had cooked today. The buzzing of a weedeater from the direction of the road, and the subsequent cries of “Danger!” and “Help!” from the grass being cut down