Fish Tails

When I was young I remember being in a place with lots of others like me. Everyone would always push and shove when we received our meals but soon after we would be hungry again. On particularly bad weeks you would see cannibalism of the sick and weaker. It would start out as just a couple of us who would either find the carcass or kill the individual, but then a swarm would develop until all that was left were the bones and a few other unidentifiable body parts. This place would always be filthy, full of grime and disease; unless of course we were “for sale” that day. On those days the healthiest would be taken to a different area to attract the attention of the buyers, in hopes that they would free up more space to breed more.



Children were often separated from their parents, if not for “sale day”, it would be because the parents were disease stricken and contagious. We were an easy commodity to come by and what did it matter if maybe thirty out of a hundred die. They could always breed more of us. And the did, the breeding was selective at first, the careful identification of the wanted traits were reproduced while the ugly were left to die alone. But then the selection became less and less picky until inbreeding began to produce useless limbs and nasty growths that would fester and then pop, spreading the diseases they were harboring.



One day I was one of the lucky ones to make it to the sale floor. For hours people came and stared at me, judging me to see if I was healthy enough to survive long enough to bring them pleasure. The ones that always wanted us were the children, to them we were a novelty that provided them with a continual source of entertainment, until we were neglected and left to die. The parents didn’t really care if a few of us died because no one fed us; there was a continuous supply of us just down the road. I had heard stories of where peculiar men with disheveled clothes and calculating eyes would buy as many as fifty of us to take home and start their own breeding farm. Sometimes it was to make another store, but often it was to breed us as food for their monsters. Teeth, claws, and fangs would tear through our delicate bones, mutilating our bodies until their hunger was sated. Occasionally when the home operations got too big they would bring some of the offspring of the abducted, to sell them back and to eliminate the unneeded excess.



By the time I had given up hope of ever escaping this farm of death, a little girl stopped in front of me and begged her mother to let her take them home so she could have one just like her friends. The girl twisted her auburn pigtails in her hands as her mother debated how much trouble it would be to keep us. The mother agreed but she could only have two of us. The girl quickly gazed through us and picked out me and another poor soul who I had never talked to but had seen a few times. The Seller came and dropped us into a bag filled with water and handed us to the little girl.