Pushcart Prize Nominee

after Haruki Murakami & Yoko Ogawa

One day fish started falling from the sky. There was no forewarning, no buzz of satellite sensors or emergency inclusion in the morning’s weather fore-cast—it was radio-silent. Cars drove down the roads and passersby walked along the pavement, and occasionally a jaywalker halted a car, which, seeth-ing, honked three times before shutting up. There was a woman who held the hands of two children, and a man with a barking dog straining on its leash. Someone in a floral-patterned dress that cut their ankles was drink-ing coffee as traffic lights blinked orange. The sun was bright, melting into cityscapes and wild-grown forests and rural countryside, swelling with the afternoon hunger of cows and horses. A person in an ugly sunflower hat sneezed. They wiped their elbow against their nose, and when their arm came down, the fish had started falling.

There were all kinds of them—fat-bellied salmon that twitched on stone pavements, sleek mackerel glinting nickel-silver, snappers and an-chovies and striped bass, and carp, tuna, paddlefish. They struck the roads and cars crashed into each other, angry drivers getting out of their BMWs and sedans and vans, with phones in their hands, ready to call insurance, before they saw the fish. The woman with the two children crashed into the dog, which nipped at her open sandals. Her hands came apart from the children’s. Her shoe streaked with the gutted remains of slapped-down cod, greased at the soles with black blood. The man apologized and drew back his dog.

What’s happening? he asked. Do you know? Is that fish? Is the world ending?

I don’t know, the woman said. I don’t know.

Her children bent to look at the fish, their little fingers inching closer and closer to the dead, beady eyes. Don’t touch that, the woman snapped. They snatched their hands back and peered into their reflections on beached scales, their faces oblong and elastic.

Someone has to know something, the man said. Don’t you have anyone to call? His dog nosed around.

No, the woman said, I’m alone.

The air was clogged with blood, and the sour scent of a morning fish market. The dog’s mouth gaped with salmon. Traffic lights chameleoned, the streets motionless. The children gasped in delight at the way fish scales rippled in the glare of the afternoon sun, their fist-sized, dusty hearts waking up for the first time.

The man looked at the woman.

He said: you don’t have to be alone. The woman looked at him and at the fish flopping on the ground, and the sun was a warm film on her bare legs, and her children’s palms were still gloved with the heat of her hands, and the man’s dog was barking, again, and he said, softly, the lines of his face deepened by shadow, if it’s the end of the world, you won’t be alone. I’m here. The woman nodded.

It wasn’t the end of the world, but she still took him home. Her small house was big enough to fit five. She had an unused metal bowl for the dog.

Fish fell and did not stop falling. Every week, on a random day, at a random hour, at a random minute, unpredictable down to the second, fish flew down from the sky. There were small ones—rainbow platys, white-bellied guppies, blue–yellow striped zebra fish—that children stole off streets and buried in their backyards, holding funerals for their newfound Joes and Zoes and Jacks, digging fish-sized holes with their toy spades. Larger ones followed: flatfish, sea bream, open-mouthed sablefish. Then came sharks in all shapes and sizes—whale sharks, basking sharks, tiger sharks—that struck buildings and broke windows. In several countries people died from the onslaught of these fish, ocean-heavy bodies easily pulverizing human bone. Tractors lifted fish and cranes drew them across the horizon, tossing them into landfills and bodies of water, disinterring corpses. Funerals were held with closed caskets. Morgues could hold no more death. Fish canvassed roads and streets, dammed up train tracks and airports, roofed apartment buildings and layered the hanging branches of backyard trees. Cities swam in fish. Something had to be done. Something immediate.

Governments conducted lab work to ascertain the edibility of these fish. The results came back positive. Recipes blared on TV—people roasted fish on grills, baked them, ate them raw. The umbrella industry grew and morphed to produce umbrellas strengthened with steel, which people brought with them outdoors to avoid what was now known as a Fish Fall.

Life carried on. The woman bought four of the newest umbrellas and experimented with fish recipes for her two children and the man, suffusing the small, white-walled house with the dappled smell of lemon-cream and oregano and garlic. The man’s dog ate in the living room, the children’s wandering hands always leaving imprints on its fur. The man continued to work at his job in the city center, but he came home in the evenings and brought stories of his days for the children. The woman owned a coffee shop that had been decimated by one of the first sharks from a Fish Fall, and she visited the ruins, occasionally, to see if she could unearth some of the paintings that had hung on the walls, or if she could piece together the antique wooden chair she had bought for her first child with the splinters she found scattered in between concrete. She bought new furniture for the house and refashioned the old first-floor study room into a place for the man and his dog. She and the children slept upstairs.

The woman and the man decorated his bedroom walls together, painting red-streaked salmon and arching mackerel and pink, mean snappers. They sat on the porch, where the third step had caved in from the thrashing belly of a tuna, and stared into the sky. What’s your favorite color, the man asked. The woman thought. She crossed her legs, and her ankles met each other as tenderly as knuckles from interlocking hands.

Blue, she said. You? The man looked at her and wanted to give her everything that was blue. He wanted to show her the ocean without dead bodies of fish floating on its surface. He wanted to take her swimming and goggle his eyes open in salt-water to watch her body extend itself to its full length, as beautiful and secretive as a mathematical formula.

I don’t know, he said, but maybe you.

I’m not a color, the woman said. Sun-warmed wood bridged the space between their bodies. Winds whistled like falcon trainers giving the signal to come home. The man listened to cars honking on the next street, their blaring dampened by the drowsiness that accompanied sunset. The man’s dog slept a hand away, its legs curled on the stone walkway. The woman looked at the man.

Then blue, the man said. Blue is my favorite color.

The man’s arm cast a shadow over the sun-warmed wood and stuttered. His fingers shook. The sweetness of lemon fish washed with garlic butter drifted from the open kitchen window. The woman was still looking at him, her neck curved like a swan. She didn’t move. The man stared at her. The man’s dog snarled in its dream and relaxed, its tongue lolling out, black ears flat as a flounder. The children’s voices were softened by the walls of the living room. The man reached for the woman’s hand, and the woman sat still. Their hands met. The fish started falling, again, the week’s Fish Fall, and a tiny needlefish straddled the crevice of the woman’s shoe. It was silver, like the glint of a wedding ring. She held his hand. They watched the rain of fish together.

Months after the first Fish Fall had occurred, people went about their day, bringing along their steel-metalled umbrellas and trudging blood-slicked pavements with their usual bags. They went to their jobs. People went to funerals, usually closed-casket ones, and checked into hospitals for minor illnesses, and bought flowers, and ate lunch, and argued with the people they loved most. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Even the fish—at first a sight that had stayed the steps of many passersby—had now become a common occurrence.

It was even a joy, now. The sharks had stopped falling, and the medium fish hadn’t made an appearance for weeks. All that was left was the small ones, which silvered in hidden folds of shirts and the crevices of large bags. The Fish Falls weren’t dangerous anymore, and people liked seeing the small fish fall from the sky, like elongated rain droplets that didn’t dissolve when touched. The children played with them on the streets.

Then the first fingers started to disappear.

It started with the thumb—an office worker in the City Center was typing a report on her laptop, words building on her screen, and she blinked, her eyes dry. She took a sip of water and resumed typing. When she went to press the space key, there was something missing. She looked down. Her thumb was gone. Or rather, it was there, but she didn’t know what it was used for. She couldn’t remember ever having such a thing. She started typing, again, and her report was submitted. Her superior read it and it was approved. The office worker mentioned to her superior that her thumb was gone, and her superior sent her to a hospital, and she went on national TV, proclaiming that she didn’t know what a thumb was. Panic drowned the world.

Some people didn’t lose their thumbs. Frantically, scientists started searching for a common pattern—one that isolated those who had lost their thumbs from those who hadn’t. Governments pooled together resources, like they had when the Fish Falls first started. It was concluded that only those who hadn’t eaten the fish kept their thumbs, their fingers. There was something in the fish-meat that made people lose their ability to sense through their bodies. Something that made people lose their hands.

The woman started to lose her fingers before the man. It wasn’t long before she could only feel the tip of her pinkie—she could no longer grasp cutlery. She ate with her mouth cold on the porcelain plates. The children followed her example, their hands dangling at their sides. The man tried to feed her, but he only had his index finger and pinkie left—his grasp dipped and faltered until food spilled from his spoon. The woman licked the plate clean. She looked at the man. She could no longer cook with her hands. She used her wrists to flip pans. The children’s fingers hung loosely over the man’s dog, and their arms met its fur. The dog barked and tried to bite their fingers, but they didn’t flinch. Good dog, they said. Doggy, doggy. We love you.

The man could still use his pinkie. He walked around the house’s small garden and watered the plants, hooking the watering sprout with the valley between his unfeeling index finger and pinkie. The woman learned to use her wrists and arms. They sat together on the porch, and wondered if this would ever end. The children used their mouths to nudge puzzle pieces together in the living room. People walked the streets with steel-tipped umbrellas cradled in the nook of their elbows, except the fish no longer came. Only scales, sometimes, which drifted like colored confetti in afternoon light. They paved the streets with a thin film of rainbow.

There were too few people with hands to clean up the streets, and the pavements grew wild with shrubs. The traffic lights were glassed with dust. Cows and sheep ran across cities, their fields broken open by collapsed fences left in disrepair. Things fell apart. People fell apart.

As time went on, governments began to dissolve. Countries collapsed in on themselves. It started with hands disappearing, but slowly, arms followed—then toes, feet, legs, lower torsos. People sat at their desks and waited to disappear completely. Their bodies shrunk. Soon, they could only move their mouths. Voices dissipated, trapped by useless organs. Language disappeared. The world morphed into a giant crater. Sound became soundless. Oxygen no longer filled lungs.

The man sat on the porch’s third step with the woman, the dent in the middle governing their distance. They listened to the birds sing. There was no more traffic—people could not drive. The man’s dog half-heartedly thumped its tail in the living room, its fur grayed and belly sagged. It had not had food in a week. The children had melded into their rooms. The man turned to the woman. He thought of how all blue things reminded him of her. He thought of how the fish had looked that day, thrashing and animated by death, when his dog crashed into her, and how her soles had been greased with black blood. How she had been holding the hands of her two children.

The man looked at the woman. He tried to take her hands in his, but there were no hands to hold. All that was left of them were scales—scales as blue as a hot, summery morning. Scales, glimmering. Her eyes, now beady, sightless, drying up. Her life asphyxiated. His, too.

The man tried to look at his hands. He had none. He had no head to look with. He remembered how the woman’s hands had felt the day she told him her favorite color, and how they had felt the days after—how they had been warm and solid, like holding a piece of sun-warmed wood. He had known her hands as well as his own. He had known her. He would never know her again. She would never ask him to come home again.

It was the end of the world, but the man and the woman didn’t see it. As they flopped on the porch’s third step, their tails beautiful as the cold metal of a flipped coin, the dog raised its wizened head from the living room. It padded towards the porch. It stopped by the man and the woman, leaning its snout to sniff at their sleek bodies, and opened its mouth.

Claire Zhou is a student from Suzhou, China. Her poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, Chestnut Review, Puerto del Sol, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. A 2024 finalist for Tinderbox’s Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize and Palette Poetry’s Rising Poet Prize, her work has also been recognized by the National Young Arts Foundation, Hollins University, the Adroit Prizes, and more. She founded Words Beyond Bars, a literary journal for those affected by incarceration (https://www.wordsbeyondbars.com/).

This piece was originally published in Salt Hill 54.