Gasp

Fiction by Justin Kamp

I am at the supermarket. I have a note in my phone with the names of things I need, although some of them are still there from the last time I went to the supermarket, and those things I try to mentally blank out from their space on the screen. I can’t quite remember which ones are essential, but I think I have the long and short of it all right.

It’s raining here, and it has been for days. This is apparently an anomaly, something to make comment about on the train or on the bus or to co-workers. I’d say something about it, if I could. Back home, it’s fifty below. It’s so cold that water in the ground is cracking. They’re calling them frost quakes.

I’m looking for something, though I can’t remember what, because I haven’t changed the list and the blanks in my mind clutter together like people at a party, breathing into and out of each other. At these things I feel like: fish, sans water. I remember this article I read once, one that tries to make you feel good about the world and your place in it. Something about water. Message: isn’t it something to be alive at all?

The word flounder means: a group of flatfish species, and also, to struggle to move or obtain footing. It’s unclear if the noun can commit the verb. There has never been a fish with feet.

I’m at the back of the store, and I briefly wonder how I’ve arrived here again. In front of me are rows and rows of meat. There are fish, too, but they are separate from the meat, because they are still fish, and not yet broken down into bits and stripped of their skin and their face. I ask for a whole red snapper. On the plane here I had felt a terrible sight in my periphery. Someone was staring directly into the side of my head. They were right there, yet I couldn’t turn to look at them. I felt them swirling into something worse. I look at the fish, and it looks back.

In its fish brain there exists no word such as fish or rain or lonely. Staring into its eyes I feel like that thing in the seat next to me: a blank shape, a terror pleading to be seen. Camouflage and static. I want it to know the name I call myself, not the name my parents gave me but a name like dirt or air, something like the curve of the earth. I want it to know me in the same way you know you are breathing before you have to remember how.

I am talking to you now.

Above us the lights are all turning down. No one quite knows what is happening, and you and I share a look like: I told you it would come to this. I carry you with two hands, like I always have, and I lay you down onto the conveyor belt. Outside, a shuddering. Something else is falling, something more than rain. It slaps the windows, it flops on the pavement, gasping.

Justin Kamp is a writer and journalist living in Chicago. His work has appeared in Chicago Magazine, the Chicago Reader, Paste Magazine, the Hard Times and elsewhere.