‘The Peace Walk’ + ‘Breathing with Fish’

By Melissa Martin

 Peace Walk 138, July 2023

I took the plastic fish for a walk in the rain. It’s not that I’m an expert in either plastic or fish relationships, it’s just I thought the fish might be lonely and would enjoy visiting other bits of plastic in the neighbourhood. I introduced him to the spluttering, gushing downpipes, with whom he shared ancestors from some dark far away place. I held him in their bubble stream. We shared our aloneness, happily I thought, together, in the rain.

I was happy because I love the freshness and forgiveness of a downpour. My happiness swam down my arm into the hand holding the plastic fish, to ask him about his dreams. My happiness and I did not understand the fish’s dreaming, and we did not understand that we did not understand, so we carried on playing our plastic fantasy in puddles and under raindrops.

The trees and the dead know that certain kinds of happiness can make a person insensitive, treacherous even. When we were among the trees in Spring Bank Cemetry the roots began to absorb the soil minerals and rainwater with a loudening majesty. Overhead, the vast leafy canopy guzzled daylight. Then the hungry ghosts came and they were as hungry as the trees. My happiness fled. My feet stayed. The plastic fish gasped. The plastic fish suffering in his present form, calling out the harm, ancient and still to come, to people, plastic and fish. Breathing with polymer gills is a difficult crackling process.

 Breathing with Fish