My Little Fish
Something is happening to me, I don’t know what, only that when I went to the bathroom one day during Mrs. X–’s class, a dead fish came out of my body and tumbled into the toilet bowl. It was flat and thin, crowned with petallike gills that shimmered under the dirty stall lights, a shock of red-orange against white. I did not know what to do. The toilet hadn’t flushed since the beginning of the year. If I left the fish in the bathroom, my classmates would be sure to trace its odor back to me; it reeked of rust and decay and salt water. So I took the little fish and I chewed it up. Salt flooded my mouth in a warm torrent. I did not tell anyone what I had done.
A short story by Maggie Wu.