*This is what I do when I'm bored...
Hal settled down next tho his wife, watching the fading light filter through the cloudy water above them.
"Nice currents, we had today," said Hal, breaking the silence.
"Hmmm...," Bert responded, distracted by her own thoughts,
Hal sighed, Bert hadn't been herself recently. He understood why, for the last two spawning seasons there had been no eggs to fertilize, they had no offspring in those year classes.
"Honey," he said gently," you have to stop letting it get you so down, when we go to the Slope this fall there will be eggs. I promise."
"No," Bert whispered, her voice shaking slightly, " I won't be going this year. I can't take the disappointment again."
Hal flicked his tail in slight shock, no quite knowing what to say. The idea of not going to the spawning grounds was simply..."Outrageous!"
"We're old dear, we've seen 27 turns of the ocean. All I want to do is rest. We've released millions of offspring into the world and many of them have returned here to raise families of their own, some of the eldest are even grandparents. All of our friends from our year class have long disappeared into the deep. I'm not going to the slope this year."
Hal rolled one eye over to look at his wife just in time to see her throw her head up and swallow a juvenile yellow eye that had been carelessly lingering around her head for too long. 'Some fishes children,' he thought. Then Hal thought of his children and remembered how the ones who had returned to from the long drift had been so beautiful, so like his amazing wife. Hal sighed, resigned. He hadn't won an argument with Bert in 27 years, mostly because he wasn't the kind of fish who could deal with seeing his love unhappy. He didn't think he would start winning one today.
"Alright," Hal finally said, "We don't have to go to the slope. Where do you want to go?"
Bert looked above her, fins aquiver, "Up," she said, "I want to go up, to where the ocean meets the sky."
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Hal hatched out of his egg with thousands of brothers and sisters on a rather unremarkable day in early March. His parents, being rather unimaginative even for halibut, had named all the boys Hal and all of the girls Hallie. Thus he began life, drifting upward and to the West on the strong ocean currents of the North Pacific. He spent his early days eating plankton and chatting with the others of his year class that he saw.
Most of those conversations were the same: complaints about how much it hurt to have one eye join the other on a single side of their head, mixed with a general excitement about settling out and finally having some control about where to travel next. In short there was nothing remarkable about it, except that he survived it.
Life in the open ocean was treacherous. At the start of life, Hal was little better then finned plankton, with no real means to escape larger predators. He'd seen many a unlucky halibut consumed by their unforgiving maws. Fortunately he was not one of them.
Some eight months after he hatched out, Hal settled in a quiet bay on the eastern side of Kodiak Island. With both eyes firmly settled on one side of his head, Hal's translucent body slowly became pigmented. He felt that at a little over three inches long, he was a very good looking fish.
It was there, in the protected area of the nursery grounds that Hal first met Berta...and he could not stand her.
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Hal was disturbed by his wife's request. He had heard terrifying rumors about what happened to fish who fish who wanted to see the sky. He'd heard that none of them came back, or if they did they came back horribly mutilated. he'd even heard of one fish come back with a long worm like growth coming out of it's dorsal fin.
'Of course,' Hal thought, ' all this is rumor and halibut are prone to excessive exaggeration. Not to mention the rumors are inconsistent - either fish come back or they don't and if they don't then who started the rumors?'
TO BE CONTINUED...
although in all honesty who wants this shit to continue?
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