Cover

1:1 – 1:2 – 1:3

2:1 – 2:2 – 2:3

3:1 – 3:2 – 3:3

4:1 – 4:2 – 4:3

5:1 – 5:2 – 5:3

Coda

Missy and Coco left the market area and headed for home. For the afterlife of her, Missy couldn’t figure out why someone so sensible and smart as Allie would have blindly sided with religion over science when confronted with a straightforward afterlife-or-second-death decision.

Months later, Missy learned something so disturbing she would’ve fallen apart had it not been for the amulet in her tiara that she had fashioned out of the single, perfectly-shaped semi-precious gem left at the site of Allie’s fatal spawning. During a routine dental visit, Dirty Rich the Clown Dentist (Missy Impossible, Chapter 5), while high on his own laughing gas, revealed to her that it was he who, disguised as a priest, had persuaded Allie to reject the advice of the ichthyologist and to spawn instead of have her gonads surgically removed to save her afterlife. He only did it, he said half jokingly, because he wanted to drill her.

Lying supine on the bed of leaves with her arms extended, Allie gave in to the agonizing pain radiating outward from her inguinal area to her caudal fin. “To be only half a monster is insanity!” she cried out, repudiating the only way she knew how and with what limited strength that remained her accursed hybrid condition and damned post mortem existence (cf. Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, Book 8, Chapter 4). How did she not see it coming to this? What had she done during her previous lifetime to deserve her hellish afterlife as half skeleton, half mermaid? What perverse god in the heavens thought it just to hand down such a cruel and capricious punishment? Hers was no gift.

At that very moment, a searing pain around her anal vent overtook Allie so forcefully that her garbanzos popped out of their sockets. She started releasing what felt like fifty thousand and one eggs, all of them atretic and the last one of a crystalline composition more perfect and of an appearance more dazzling than centuries of alchemy and sorcery had ever produced. (No. 11)

Forsaken on her leaf mound which, dear reader (and there’s probably only one of you out there), covered the very spot where Allie’s parents had thawed and dislodged her from her icy manger years ago, Allie took one final breath and re-died. (No. 12)

At some point before dawn, the seafood vendor’s cat extricated Allie’s remains from the mound and carried them off, leaving her uninseminable eggs to the rats and the elements (No. 13). The vendor thanked his kitty for the gift and then buried Allie’s remains deep within the trash so that the cat couldn’t retrieve them. (No. 14).

Blind Allie’s Dolores Street (a.k.a. Way of Sorrows)

No. 1: Allie becomes aware that the time has come for her to spawn (4:3)

No. 2: Allie accepts her fate (5:1)

No. 3: Allie flounders for the first time (5:2)

No. 4: Allie sees her mother in a vision (5:2)

No. 5: A shopkeeper helps Allie advance towards the market by propelling her with the jet from his hose (5:2)

No. 6: A Veronica’s Unicorn Rental delivery van washes Allie’s face with a splash from a puddle as it passes her in the street (5:2)

No. 7: Allie flounders for the second time (5:2)

No. 8: Allie is lifted from the gutter by two women from town (5:2)

No. 9: Allie flounders for the third time (5:2)

No. 10: Allie is stripped of the skins covering her chickpea eyes (5:2)

No. 11: Allie releases her eggs (5:3)

No. 12: Allie dies on a mound of leaves (5:3)

No. 13: Allie is removed from the mound by the seafood vendor’s cat (5:3)

No. 14: Allie is buried in the trash (5:3)

“I’m trying to get to the market, but I’ve lost my way. Can you point me in the right direction?”

“It’s near State street at the end of Dolores street, downtown.”

“Can I get there via State?”

“No. Only via Dolores.”

Delirious from hunger, Allie floundered (No. 3). Although half Atlantic salmon, she had lost almost all sense of direction and could barely navigate the streets of her own town. Worse, visions of her mother kept dancing through her head like that mesmerizing gypsy girl from the book whose fate now seemed intertwined–but hardly completely–with her own (No. 4). If it weren’t for the shopkeeper who had propelled her and some litter along the street gutter with the jet from his hose, she wouldn’t have made it to the market (No. 5).

Lying face up in the gutter on Dolores at the entrance to the market, Allie felt the invigorating splash of cold water across her frontal bone courtesy of a passing Veronica’s Unicorn (both foreign and domestic) Rental delivery van (No. 6; cf. Missy Impossible, Chapter 10). Her mind drifted back to those sweet moments in the pool with her teammates, which now seemed out of reach like hazy distant memories.

Physically exhausted, Allie floundered a second time (No. 7). Never before had she experienced such lethargy in her tail and throughout her bones. She could barely advance, let alone jump the curb to enter the market.

Suddenly, as if by some magical force, she rose above the level of the curb and floated northward into the market space where, upon reaching some fateful point, she was laid to rest onto a bed of wet decaying leaves. “That’s good enough, Coco,” she heard a vaguely familiar voice say. “That fish’s going nowhere” (No. 8).

Immobilized both emotionally and physically on that cold and damp bed of leaves, Allie, having floundered for the third time, started to cry (No. 9). Those impermeable translucent skins that had been her secret weapon in the pool for so long but that, she came to realize, had also clouded her vision, detached from her big garbanzos and fell forever from her eyes (No. 10).

“Swear to God, Allie. I sometimes wonder if you have a brain.”

“None of us does, Missy. That’s the point. Why would I listen to a fish biologist when no scientist can explain how we are able to exist without a brain or any other organs?”

Allie had made up her mind, and nothing Missy said was going to change it. She wasn’t going to have her gonads removed. Instead, she was going follow the counsel of her priest and accept the sensation in her inguinal area as another gift and a heavenly sign that she had entered the labyrinth.

She couldn’t put her boney finger on the trigger, though summer had recently turned to fall and, for reasons she couldn’t explain, she had pretty much stopped eating. And then there was the urge to run up to the spot between the seafood and legume stands at the market where her parents found her so many years ago. Weakened from the lack of food, she surrendered to it, having persuaded herself that the urge was a divine calling (No. 2).