We pull into the parking lot and it’s raining, and my mind is circling down in the deep blue deep, thousands of feet under, where only some number of days ago a creature was swimming. It is my thirtieth birthday. They can live to be thirty years old, you know, I say, and she looks at me with a vague smile as she turns off the ignition. It could have the same birthday as me, I say, and she shakes her head, maintaining the puzzled smile. That seems unlikely, she says. Inside, a small woman with a long black braid walks us to a table in the corner. There is a candle. There is a violet in a glass. We sit down. Water, yes please. We are the only patrons in the small restaurant. Jess smiles at me, and we look at the menus, but I know, of course, what I will order. It’s back there now, in the kitchen, behind the counter laying on a tray, wrapped in plastic, waiting to be sliced, and I can see the chef is cutting something, his arm is moving back and forth, and in his hand out of sight must be the knife, cutting, perhaps dismembering or disemboweling, preparing the flesh. Should we have a drink? she says. Her eyes are so kind, so welcomingly light, I have always liked the lightness of her eyes, like shallow waters, they make me feel as if I can see into her, but without any chance of falling in. We order a bottle of red wine. We hold hands on the table, our fingers are lit by the flickering candle. The restaurant seems to grow dim around us as we wait, wait, wait for the wine, the waitress, the menu, the table, the chair beneath me, the floor beneath the chair, the dirt beneath the floor, the gravel and clay and rocks and the rain washing through them, the drips and rivulets flowing outward, washing out and combining into streams that flow away and into the sea where they swirl and mix and lose their freshness and become salt like everything else, and down down into the deep where a great silver creature with purple flesh swims, and it flicks its tail in the dark, and it moves past me and its great, flat, black eye is watching me, an eye one could fall into, an eye with a blackness deeper than the ocean. The waitress returns and fills our glasses with a red that seems to swirl with shadows. She places the bottle between us, on the label is a bare and crooked tree. Are you ready to order? she asks, and despite being only as tall as I while sitting down, she seems to tower above me. Jess orders something, I order eel, yellowtail, and salmon nigiri, and then after a pause and a breath: I’ll also have the bluefin kama toro, and the waitress smiles slowly, and her entire face seems to transform, and her eyes become even blacker, black as space. It’s his birthday, says Jess, as if acknowledging the ticking of the clock is required, as if I can’t order whatever I want in any case, as if time is running out like blood from a wound. Excellent choice, says the waitress, and she departs to give our order to the chef, and he glances in my direction and smiles, and I see the knife glint in his hand as he turns to the platters of various flesh. Kama toro, the flesh of the jaw and gill area of the tuna, the fattiest and the scarcest part of the blackeyed creature that swims through my dreams, the jaw that moves up and down and the mouth that opens wide unhinging and scooping into it the swarming mackerel and herring and crayfish and krill and squid and cuttlefish and all forms of life that scatter around it like a cloud of insects in the dead of night, then with a flick of its tail it’s gone, into the void. ...does, when you’re out of your twenties, don’t you think? Jess is looking at me expectantly, the wine is thick and red, pooled in a goblet hovering beneath her chin, and the red is reflected up at her face, winelight shining up and bathing her pallid skin in a hue like raw lamb. There is nothing but now, I say, and now is fading. A storm flickers in the blue of her skeyes, We've got many years ahead, she says. Of course, I say. The waitress returns and lays the platters of rainbow colored flesh before us. Oh it’s so beautiful! Jess lifts her phone, snap snap, and thus preserves for eternity in the afterliving clouds the huetiful remnants of a dozen disparate fish. The bluefin shines in the center of the plate, a pale muted pink with white lines of fat in the center center center of my being center of my eye center of the black depths where the beast swims in my dreams, and the others are nothing, specs of refuse orbiting the center. I pick up the slice of flesh and place it on my tongue, cool, soft, smooth, melting, shock of flavor, fat, oil, the sea, salt wind, tides, foam and spray. Thirty years ago in the warm surface waters of the southern mediterranean a larva hatched from an egg, one in a cloud of fifteen million fertilized eggs laid and then abandoned in those skyblue waters, and the larva grew and ate, and ate the other fertilized eggs, ate its siblings and grew, until it, the lone survivor, formed fins and gills and stretched and flexed, strong and large, and dove into the depths, deeper and farther from its birthplace to eat larger fish and grow larger itself, and all the while I, a squalling baby in a crib was growing too, sucking milk and then gumming pureed vegetables while the bluefin hunted and fought, battled and won, again and again it won in that hostile darkness and its muscles grew taught and dexterous and quick, and its jaw opened and closed and opened and closed until one day, thirty years later, it closed on a trap and was pulled to the surface and was cut open and disemboweled and sliced apart and put on a plate for me. United at last, we are one, at last at last we are one, the fats and oils and proteins melt on my tongue and slide down my throat and dissolve in my stomach and are absorbed by my cells and integrated into my blood and body and we are one. How is it? Jess asks. My jaw moves up and down, up and down. It tastes like a life, I say. And the waitress returns to the table, and she is looking at me with her vast, black eyes and Jess is looking at me with her clear watery eyes, black, blue, black, blue, who, who, and I am up from my seat and diving into the pupil of her black eye, a black circle that opens wider and wider like an infinite aperture and I fall through a chaotic wind down into and through her black eye and down into a cold sea, and everything is silence and cold, and everything is darkness and still, and I swim and swim and with a flick of my feet I dash away into the watery night, away, dodging, away, biting and fighting, away, and my jaw opens and closes on the herring and the mackerel and the squid and I am so strong, so strong, until I see the glint of the knife, a great metal blade shining in my face and I’m falling, down out of the eye and flopping onto the counter, slick wet and naked and my arm hanging off the edge and my fingers grazing the ground, and the chef is leaning over me and holding the knife, the sharpest knife to ever be forged with a blade a single molecule thick, and the blade passes through the skin of my stomach like butter and red wine gushes out and pours gracefully over my side and down off the counter to patter on the floor like rain. And he cuts so gently and slowly, until the perfect slice is removed, and he places it carefully onto a jade and sapphire plate, and I am born.
Jonas David is a writer and editor at Lucent Dreaming magazine. He lives in the Seattle area with his wife and their two cats.
Read Jonas' story in Propagule 4 here.