Time and again she wound herself around the gleam of his silver hooks, slid them into the roof of her mouth, laid herself with conspicuous ease into his woven nets and, in more dramatic instances, leaped onto the deck of his little boat. If he was leaving the ocean she might fling herself onto the sands, panting in loving fervor. And time and again, the man cut off her head and tail, pierced her through with a pole, plucked her eyes out with a spoon, or slit her belly-down. To him she symbolized good luck or opportunity. He ate her baked with round potatoes and onion salt, fried with pickles and sprinkled with lemon and dill, dressed in batter surrounded by a funnel of newspaper, or as a sandwich with large slices of tomato and mayonnaise. He even ate her the old-fashioned way, which is to say raw. Sometimes he mounted her stuffed body on a wooden frame, preserving her death look. On lively days he cut her into quarters and divided her up among his buddies and shared her with cold beer and coca-cola. No matter how he used her, whether he was generous or wasteful, merciful or cruel, she returned. If he was in the mood to torture her or be vulgar with her, still she came to him. Her brain case spanned only the size of a shelled walnut, but her passion overwhelmed the Atlantic. She was uneducated, but she knew folklore and ancient medicine. She had some philosophies about karma and the man. She felt that he would be hers millions of years from now when men no longer fished in little wooden boats and all of the coca-cola cans had disintegrated. She was not right, but just by pure coincidence that the man became bitter and sickened of being a man. He had lived a long time before this occurred, while she, not knowing his state of mind, had jumped from her silver array of scales to place herself in dull flesh. When she searched all over the East coast and failed to find him, she wrung her hands, stormed back to his little boat, drank his coca-cola, and wore his Hanes t-shirts. He, missing his boat, dived aboard to claim what was his. It was amusing to witness his egotistical self-possession, trying to defend what his gills couldn’t possibly support. But she did not laugh at him. She did take him against his will, however lovingly, into her arms. She planted a long kiss on his cold, reluctant mouth. He struggled loathingly against her until she sighed and placed him in a bin of ocean water to transport back to her New York apartment. She exported water for his living needs, placed colorful marbles on his sand bed, and a large plastic castle for him to sleep in with plenty of plants and foods. He did not seem happy about it. When he grew despondent, she consulted professors in Biology and Marine Science. He only permitted her to pet him during feeding time. Occasionally she had friends over for vegetable stir-fry and introduced him. He sank into his castle moodily. The friends acted in his favor. They discouraged the arrangement, telling her it would never work out. Any fish that had been a man only begged the moral question of retaining him against his will; any woman that had ever been a fish should have more dignity than to be more in love than she was humanly mortal. These comments hurt her. She neither wanted to harm him, nor did she want to let him go. In the end, she took her friend’s advice and she took a long trip to the Carolinas to release him there. He found this trip intolerable and cringed at each rest stop where she tumbled into the back seat, crying and attempting to pet him consolingly. Eventually, they came together as man and woman, living together in the same New York apartment. He would only make love to her briskly in the kitchen beside the cutting board. She crafted superb meals that he ate indifferently while she rubbed the back of his neck. She fussed over every article concerning him. He left her for weeks. He returned only when there was no longer any money. Her friends told her to hang it up, it was pathetic the way she was acting, cooking like Betty Crocker, wearing those ridiculous sunglasses, watching him piss and vomit all over himself. “You’ve been a fish, for Christ’s sake, show a little dignity!” She could not make them understand that his will held her beyond her control, even beyond her love for him. She loved him for millions of years until something of an amber-blue dawn day. He was out under the honey sun, leaning a bit too heavily on the side of his little wooden boat and he was looking into the waters with such intensity that she attributed some intimate meaning behind it. Three of his friends were with him, roaring obscenities and drunk. She remembered them as the same friends that had made cigarette burns all over the carpets and burned a wall hanging of Isis in her apartment that resulted in her eviction by the landlord. She eyed them defiantly from the side of the boat with a fish’s hatred. Then he, drunk and laughing hard, caught sight of her. She wiggled in his bare hands. “I am the greatest fisherman in the world!” He cried tautly before tightening his grip around her. She struggled and he squeezed her hard until she popped in the middle. True, he had administered violence with words and hands before, but his words and hands at that moment had found consecration before these witnesses and they struck badly against all her feeling for him. After that, she stayed away from his boat, her apartment door never opened, and the phone continued to ring late into the night.