What To Call the New Fish
or
How Sex the Unstoppable Fish Machine Got His Name
by Chrissy Kolaya
Emily suggests William Henry Harrison, after the finest president this country has ever seen.
Joe volunteers Fat Nerd. Fish don’t care what you call them, he says. Their feelings never get hurt.
Ron thinks up 54 Nude Honeys because, he says, fish are both singular and plural and sweet.
Brian says: How about Internal Bleeding? Every time you call your fish on the phone and say “Hey, Internal Bleeding!” you will remind yourself that being a doctor is very hard. You can’t even see the blood. How can you possibly be expected to stop it?
Mark votes for Little Baby Jesus of Bethlehem. Jesus liked all fish. He liked them so much he made fish tanks so we could watch them live and grow.
And Jennifer suggests Crash and Burn. This would be cool if your fish were a race car driver. What a story that would be for the newspapers if your fish died in a fiery car crash in the Indy 500. I can see it now: “Poor Crash and Burn! Today is the saddest day in fish car racing history!”
Sometimes life deals fish a really bad hand.
Chrissy Kolaya is the author of Charmed Particles: a novel, two books of poems: Any Anxious Body and Other Possible Lives, and two forthcoming books from Dzanc Books and Burrow Press. She teaches in the creative writing MFA program at the University of Central Florida. You can learn more about her work at chrissykolaya.com.