Steven
Jerusha Crone
My dream dinner party guest is a clementine spotted sunfish.
I’d wear a candy red dress right up to top thigh, awfully vibrant in the riverbed, in the silty section of the shallows. We both arrive at eight. I dip in slow, reserved and bitchy as midwinter warm with only good intentions. I’ve got cinnamon stick legs, and grapefruit spit glistening lips perfect for an innocent well timed bloom, saying just the right thing with the right amount of breath. The fish watches me descend. He never blinks.
It’s good to see you.
The table’s all set with rose colored radicchio, dark wine stain skinned plums, and green beans in lavish garlic lying lazily round baby blue candlesticks with honey white flames that flicker in river tempo. In jade vases squirm coontails, hydrilla and water hyacinth. There’s green grapes, pears, mandarins and miniscule crustaceans, little invertebrates delicate as desire all ivory and gold lounging sideways in the algae with their hips tilted up. I’ll tilt my hips too.
The sunfish brazen sips from my martini glass and leans forward to feel my cold human hands which he holds on to for too long. I blush twenty shades of snapdragon. He’s lovely. He’s turquoise and tomato red, juicy vesicles from mythological citrus. His tongue is toothless, with a mouth position deemed terminal in encyclopedias. I did my research beforehand. He knows. He can tell how I feel by my darkening indigo eyes. In response, he performs powerful sweeping motions with his caudal fin. He’s a little fuckboy.
I take full responsibility for this fantasy.
Ragtime piano plays.
During dinner I'll explain my theory of moral change. You must assume full agency, avoid resentment at all costs. The fish will say he saw another ex lover the night before and she told him he’s like a character in a poorly reviewed film. I imagine her tits heavy, her dark hair parted over to one side. I’ll say that up on dry land I no longer speak to women, only boys in big pants who dance to Black Eyed Peas on a Sunday afternoon in an empty bar with no concern for wealth. The fish asks what I really value. I say, Freedom. The fish will say their father is an asshole which we knew beforehand. He lives out west in a childhood home, fully regressed egg state. I lower my chin in coy sympathy. In this way, we will participate in confession in a less than catholic sense.
The meal moves on into spiced ginger, smeared butter lemon slice tinged teeth and empty shells set aside for minimal home decor later on. There’s cola, figs, and parsley dipped in tears like at a messianic passover dinner in a southern baptist home then the music shifts into easy harp like a grecian dream when I place my fingernails on my lips while he messes up his hair. Our cadence slows. Here in the cobalt we sit quietly, the sunfish and I, lapping up the lusciousness. It's a delight to hold my breath this long. It's orgasmic.
I’ll explain my hope to one day live fulltime in bad water, the brackish kind that’s salty enough to scrape these salacious perl barnacles off my flesh. There’s a virtue to saying no, certainly, a virtue like a spotted throbbed banana peel sitting on a windowsill waiting to be made into bread.
I’ve got to get better.
Then the fish might look at me, with lust in his eyes and ask so what are we doing? I’ll lean forward to say, I don’t care, I’m so full of joy. I’m flickering, quivering and the fish feels it against his pointed pectoral fin. We return to the concept of agency, nightmares, and grasshoppers dancing round on from sharp hooks floating too and fro. At the end of dinner the fish might finish off my last cigarette and say you shouldn’t see me again. When I protest the fish might say I want you so fucking much. Get out of my fucking car.
I sit spread open on the riverbank, white takeout box in hand. I’m soaking wet honey. I’m dripping down the soaked crimson fabric fingering my nipples and seeping into the mossy soft of the land that stands between the fish’s home and the county road. I’m humiliated. I’ll never love again. Instead I’ll wring out my hair until it's white as the sun, I’ll grow my metallic nails longer, decorate my ears with medium sized dry jewels. The river water scent will nestle into my lungs until I’m something else than human. I’m a bivalve shellfish, zebra striped like a whore in 2002 and I halt the means of production with my stubbornness. I stay and stay and stay.
While I wait, I eat maraschino cherries straight out of the jar. I think of future dinners with salamanders, bass, and horned toads. I slice open kiwis I never really wanted to consume. Besides, I don’t have a spoon. I’ll toss some of these sweetnesses back down in the river. There, enjoy.
I read on a website orange spotted sunfish have a high tolerance for the opaque. They like low gradients, gravel, warm water and cottonwood roots. They also like soda water, strawberry flavored vape pens, self help books and blondes. Moreover, they are very good at explaining their moral failures. From the shallows of the Brazos they text I care about you so much. It doesn’t matter, really. It was just a get to know you kinda question.
God, it's so silty. It’s liquid coal velvet slipping down my neck.
There, the fish had said, dream about that.
Steven asks another icebreaker: What kind of music do you listen to?
This is not going to end well.
Jerusha Crone is a writer and visual artist from Central Texas currently residing in Brooklyn. She holds her MA in Divinity from the University of Chicago and is a certified Texas Water Specialist with Texas Parks and Wildlife.