It was one one of the last trips of the summer to the lake, and as far as fishing goes, it had been exactly mediocre. Don’t get me wrong; a mediocre day of fishing is still a superb day compared to others. I think I can finally admit to myself that it’s not because of the specific act of fishing that I enjoyed it - it was the experience: sitting on a small, slowly rocking boat, baking in the warm sun; the flip-flip of the water bouncing backwards as it hits the boat’s sides; sandwiches with too much mayo wrapped in tinfoil that I ate on the water for lunch. And most importantly: not another person in sight - well, for the most part, anyway.
The latter is the reason I bought my fishing cabin near a lake that hadn’t been known to be lucrative, at least as far as fishing goes, for decades. The fish population had taken a dive (pun unintended) sometime in the nineties (as the gentleman who sold me the cabin had told me), and all you could expect to catch anymore were small, bony fish, that weren’t even really worth the effort of scaling and gutting and all that. This meant that I was basically the only fisherman of the lake, save for the occasional kids coming out to the shoreline with those cheap plastic fishing rods and some worms they’d dug up for bait. The water was too murky and the bottom too muddy and the shores too rocky for swimmers, all of which I didn’t mind at all.
On this mediocre yet superb day, the sun felt cool. It’s a phenomenon that has always bugged me: the sun feeling unbearably hot on some days, and cool on others, and I didn’t enjoy the unpredictability of that. Either way, there had been enough cool sun in the past couple of weeks for it to become a clear sign of the end of summer. This felt bittersweet, and I couldn’t help but think of the impending doom of autumn (and by proxy, not fishing) as I tried my best to enjoy these last few, fleeting warm days.
I’d been sitting in the boat undisturbed for a couple of hours at least, when suddenly, my rod tugged. That familiar jolt of an awaiting prize boosted my mood, like when a plushie held by the thin metal fingers of a claw machine is hovering just at the edge of the hole. I gripped the rod with both hands, and began to pull the bugger upwards.
It fought back hard, and I was glad I owned such an expensive rod, for a cheaper one might’ve simply slid out of my hands, gulped by the muddy lake. I gripped the handle tightly, and positioned my legs to stand against the side of the boat, giving me more leverage to pull from my seated position. I wondered if I’d hooked some rusty old bike at the bottom of the lake, for I’d never seen anything big enough in the lake that could put up such a fight. In any case, it was pulling at the end of the line, and I was determined not to lose my rod to the murky, muddy bottom, and so the fight had begun.
In between rounds, I pulled the line, and locked it back into place just before my foe began to pull again. I was making good progress. Once I saw my opponent, though, I thought for sure that this was a bad fight. I was going to lose, and come out with a broken nose and a black eye. But that’s the thing with fishing - you can’t run, even if you wanted to - unless you’re literally Jesus, I suppose.
It was definitely a fish, but it was bigger than anything I’d ever seen in that lake, hell, in any goddamn lake besides the fake ones at SeaWorld. Its rough scales were the size of the palm of my hand, and instead of glistening in the faint sunlight, they seemed to devour it, and the fish looked darker than the water surrounding it.
But I wasn’t going to give up, and soon enough, the fish seemed to grow tired, and I could pull it closer and closer until it was just below the surface. Somehow I maneuvered it onto my boat without rocking it over, and I had to sit down afterwards to breathe, like I was a boxer at the end of the 12th round. Luckily, the fish didn’t move around anymore. Perhaps I had simply tired it out.
In the open air I could finally see it in full view. It was four or five feet long, black as the puffs of an erupting volcano. Its mouth took up most of its gigantic head, which was by far the thickest part of the beast. In its gaping maw, it had long, sharp teeth like iron nails, and above them on both sides were two, beady black eyes, which were only discernible from the rest of its body by a faint glint.
From the moment I had the fish in the boat, I wanted to throw it back into the lake. It looked unnatural, like the only place I should be seeing it is in some documentary about deep sea creatures with weird, devilishly extraterrestrial features. The feeling that the fish was from somewhere else, like it was formed and bred and birthed to live in a faraway, inhuman habitat, kept nagging at me. But my resources were quenched by the fight, and I was simply too tired to throw it overboard without falling down with it, which was an even more unappetizing thought. To be there, in the deep dark, together with that, seemed like a nightmare not worth visiting.
The logical conclusion was to haul it to shore and see what I should do with it then, so I revved up the motor and headed back towards the cabin. Once I was back on dry land, I could maneuver the beast onto the rocky shore. It hadn’t made a single movement since it’d surfaced, so I assumed that it had simply died from the lack of oxygen. Good for me.
But then, it started to make sounds. I got spooked at first, dreading that the thing had come back to life and was going to bite my leg off, but I quickly realized the sounds weren’t coming from its mouth. They were coming from inside it. I perked out my ear, and I could hear a muffled screeching inside its plump midriff. Now, this was a problem, one which had no easy answers. Should I leave it be, and hope the sounds cease, or should I cut it open, and hope that a swarm of baby monster fish don’t jump at me and devour me like piranhas? The lizard part of my brain said leave it be, but the little boy inside me screamed look what’s inside.
I got my knife and began to make an incision, glancing at its head for any paradoxically posthumous signs of life. The fish’s scales were hard, and I had to put in quite a bit of effort to wiggle the knife through, as a thick, watery substance oozed out between its flesh. Once the cut was long enough, I pulled up the fatty, sloppy upper edge, and upon seeing what was inside, almost immediately dropped it back down. Inside it, nestled between its putrid, gray insides, was a baby. A human baby.
A thousand thoughts flashed like lightning in my mind, and all but one were left without an answer, that answer being: there was a human baby there, and human babies need to be protected and cared for. While holding the fish open with my hand, I pulled the baby out with the other. It was covered in thick slime, and the exact moment its head popped out, it began to scream.
I’d never held a baby before. I don’t have siblings, and even as my friends had begun to start their families, I’d kept a safe distance between me and their crotch-fruit. And I had my reasons. For one, babies are goddamn terrifying. Two, I didn’t want to drop one. And three, I had never learned how to hold one, which sort of goes back to reason number two. The only thing I knew about babies was that their heads need to be supported, so I lifted the screaming, sticky baby against my chest and held its head with my hand, like I’d seen new parents do. It was actually much easier to hold the baby than I thought, but then the question became: what do I do with it?
Before I could search for an answer, I felt that something was wrong. The baby’s screaming had begun to cease, and instead it started gasping for breath, like it had something stuck to its throat. I tried gently patting it on the back, like I’d seen moms do when their babies are coughing or puking or burping or whatever, but that didn’t seem to help. I lifted the baby up to face me, to perhaps see what was bothering it. It held out its hands towards something, its crusty eyes looking in that same direction, almost begging. I looked at what the baby was air-grabbing at, and it was the plastic, blue 55 gallon barrel I put freshly caught fish in to keep them alive while I decided what to do with them (which was, unless I’d forgotten to buy dinner, almost always to release them back into the lake).
The baby was turning blue, and panic began to pump my heart with big, loud beats. Its hands were grasping for the barrel, so I moved closer to it, and this seemed to only make the baby more desperate, its little arms now flailing, like it wanted to grab the barrel. Maybe it wanted to be in the water, like it had been inside the fish? I couldn’t come up with anything better/smarter to try, and with the escalating panic tightening my chest and the now bluish, gasping baby in my arms, I slowly began to lower it into the barrel feet first.
Once it was neck deep, it was still gasping for breath. Its arms and legs flailed rapidly, sending droplets of water into my eyes, like a cat being given an unwelcome bath. I thought about the fish it had been inside of. The baby was dying, that was obvious, so it was worth a shot to try; and so I dunked its head below the water, holding it just below the surface, ready to pull it out if this ridiculous plan didn’t work.
Miraculously, the baby began to calm down. I got scared that I’d now accidentally drowned a baby, so I pulled it back up, but once it was out of the water, the gasping and screaming continued. So I lowered it back down again, and it seemed content. Its bluish skin soon began to clear up. I held it there for a while, but at some point my arms became tired, so I decided to release the baby into the barrel to roam the water freely. It kept close to the surface, almost floating, so I decided that this was the best I could do for now.
It was getting late, and there was no reception at the lake, so I decided to wait until the next day to drive out through the woods until I got reception and could call a hospital to ask for instructions. I didn’t want to leave the baby unsupervised for the night, anyway. I grabbed a chair from my cabin and placed it next to the barrel, and prepared myself for a long night.
At some point I must’ve drifted off, and once I awoke (at some ungodly hour, with my eyelids dreadfully heavy) I jumped up and checked the barrel. What I saw sent shivers down my spine.
I had completely forgotten the couple of small fish I’d caught and placed into the barrel earlier that day. They must’ve kept close to the bottom as I was dealing with the baby, or maybe in my panic I had just ignored them. But now, their spindly, well-chewed skeletal bones were floating atop the water, the gray flesh gnawed clean off. Between them, I saw the baby just below the surface, suckling on the disembodied head of one of the fish, happy as can be, like it was a pacifier.
I reeled back to my chair in tired, dead-of-the-night-terror, and tried to review my options. In the end, I decided to just let it be, and wait until morning. If the baby ate the fish, then the baby ate the fish, nothing I could do about that. I checked on it once more, and it looked up at me with black, gleaming eyes, smiling as it was gnawing on the remaining bits of the fish head.
I was awoken by the crisp light of the morning sun. My sleep had been deeper this time, and so it took me a moment to recall everything that had happened. Once I did, though, I jumped back up to my feet, my legs tingling from the uncomfortable position I’d been in all night, and looked down the barrel. The baby was gone.
There was a part of me that was relieved, but that atavistic, evolutionary sense to protect babies wouldn’t let go, so I searched around the barrel, trying to find it - it couldn’t have gone far, I mean, it was a baby, after all. And why had it come out of the barrel? It obviously hated the air, and where else could it go? And then I realized exactly where it might go, and I turned my gaze to the shoreline.
There, crawling over algae covered rocks, was the baby. Right as I began to sprint towards it, the baby plunged into the water below. Once I reached the shore, I fumbled over the rocks and jumped into the knee-high water. Scrambling with my arms halfway deep in the water, I searched for the baby, and soon it became apparent that I wasn’t going to find it. The baby was gone, and all that was left was the putrid, rotten corpse of its mother-vessel fish that had dwindled to half its size by then as it dried out in the alien atmosphere. I grabbed the black, scaly fish corpse and threw it into the water, hoping that the lake would reclaim it. I wanted it gone, simple as that.
Once I came back to the cabin, a peculiar thought popped into my head.
Where was the father of the baby?