Fish Tale

It was four-forty-five in the vicinity of the department store; and the mad last-minute shoppers, fulfilling their duties to society and themselves, rushed violently through the place like chicken-hungry-barracuda-dervishes-with-their-heads-cut-off, and a small voice spoke from inside, or very close to, my head:

Who was i to disagree?

(Put down that thing you were looking at, it cost more than you have anyway, disengage yourself from that chartreuse saleslady, push through the crowd, excuse me sir, suppress a cry as some human walrus trods upon your bare feet, the door looms up ahead like some glass eldorado, suddenly the crowd tightens like bipedal sardines, and you're lifted off your feet by the wave of flesh and deposited in the elevator, you try to speak but you can only blow bubbles, the bodies eddy like primate plankton and the jaws begin to close...)

("GOING DOWN!", the doors are shut now and the beast begins to move, "THIRD FLOOR, FLOTSAM, JETSAM, PARASITIC ANIMOLECULES...", "SECOND FLOOR, GUPPIES, GROUPERS, GILLFISH...", "FIRST FLOOR, OCTOPODS, BATHYSCAPHS, ICHTHYOSAURS...", suddenly Leviathan stops and the jaws open...)

The little voice had been building in intensity and by this time it was tearing my brains apart, ripping my flesh, gouging my eyes and setting fire to my hair, and i began to scream, too.

...And as the voice and i screamed together, the fish began to turn back into people who screamed with us, until a cacophony of primal screams beat our brains back into our natural state of normal, comfortable, human sedation, and i was standing in the parking lot, alone.

There was a slip of paper on the windshield of my car, and i sat down in the driver's seat and read it:

When i got home i tore the paper into infinitely small pieces...