WC: 1904
The female anglerfish’s teeth are so big she can’t close her mouth. She wears a long bright light that hangs in front of her bulging eyes. She exists in a world without sunlight. She has evolved to hunt prey, protect herself, and see in the darkness.
The male anglerfish is one twentieth the size of the female. He has evolved only to sense the pheromones of the female. Once he finds her, he attaches himself to her like a parasite. He exists off her life, feeding on the nutrients she gathers from her long cold searches. He is a ghost limb, who follows her through the empty ocean currents.
When all their kids have finally graduated from college she wonders how easy it would be to scratch his name off the lease. She never says anything to him. He never says anything to her, with his mouth to full of her blood.
•
I work behind the counter of a bookstore. I sell Nora Roberts and Nicholas Sparks to old white women.
When the leaves start to turn she comes in. She asks me how my day is going. The phone rings before I can answer. Then a small pimpled boy wants to buy the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Then a man in a crop top wants to know which dog book won’t make him cry. When I look up, she is wandering across the parking lot. She stops to stare at the menu of a café that has been closed since noon.
I want to run after her. I want to grip her arm and pull her face away from the café menu. I want to look her in the eye and say: “My day is going okay.”
•
There are jellyfish in the ocean who swim in hives. They connect themselves to each other telepathically and travel across the sea like cars driving during rush-hour. They can’t see. They can’t smell. They can’t hear. But they can sense each other. They float through the ocean in a pack, like drunk girls on the strip. They know everything about each other. They are each other. And anything that isn’t them, gets electrocuted.
When a single jellyfish gets over four-thousand likes on Instagram it is immediately promoted to Chair Jellyfish. If one jellyfish goes without hearing the words “congratulations” for over 6 years, it will be told to swim in the back.
•
I used to live in a college town. It was when I was in college. After I graduated I left. I missed it. I missed the dark skies and the raincoats. I missed the sleepy shops and the slow drivers. I missed the guitar player who strummed outside the bank on main street. I missed the feeling that I could hide away in the darkness forever. The feeling that I could live inside of crumbling coffee shops, work a job at the dining hall, and let my 20’s pass me by.
I missed it enough to buy a plane ticket.
When I arrived, the skies were still dark, and the drivers were still slow. The shop windows stood proudly in the same place. The guitar player still strummed.
I felt a sense of awe that the entire town was still there.
After you leave you will realize that towns always forget you before you forget them.
I ordered coffee at my favorite old café. The boy working behind the counter recognized me.
“You used to wear glasses, right? You used to wear glasses and you had different hair?”
I nodded. I remembered him. I remembered what character he played in our university’s production of Les Misérables. I remembered a specific comment he made in a Comparative Literature class we shared. I remembered the way he looked the day after Donald Trump became the President of the United States of America.
I wanted to ask him if he was doing any acting, if he’s in any productions. But I was afraid he’d say no, and I’d be stuck talking to the theater major, who still lives in the same apartment and works at the Bagelry.
•
Vampire squids have large pouches covering their entire body. When they hunt they can throw this pouch over their body and pounce on their prey like a small child pretending to be a ghost under a white bed sheet. Their pouches have threatening looking spikes which they show off to the prey whilst inside out. These spikes are harmless. It is the vampire squids deepest fear, that one day their prey will laugh at them, and their imaginary spikes.
As far as science knows the vampire squid has never mated. It is an unseen occurrence. As far as science knows, the male vampire squid gives the female vampire squid a sperm sack which she then uses at her own convenience.
Science has observed a female vampire squid who guarded her sperm sack for longer than her life expectancy. She willed herself to live, for the safety of her babies. When they were born she was overjoyed. She loved them. When she asked them how their day at school was, they always responded with, “Fine.” Then after a long pause they’d ask, “What’s for dinner?”
While I was in town I met my best friend’s new girlfriend. She’s a freshman. She’s small and timid. She’s afraid of driving a car and using cigar paper to roll blunts.
He’s a senior. He’s loud, and comical, self-deprecating, but smarter than you.
She compared me to a rainbow flag. She didn’t know who Monica Lewinsky was, and she’d never used a shot glass. She felt insecure when she saw my birthday on my driver’s license. She was the only one who couldn’t order a beer at the Mexican restaurant where we got dinner. Instead of saying something nice I made fun of her for liking the movie Clue. I wondered if she’d be more comfortable in the dorms.
They were what I was afraid of becoming. They were all touching and no talking.
I remembered being 18. I remembered sitting in classrooms unsure of why I needed to know the answers to multiple choice questions, just feeling confident that I would someday. I remembered driving in the car with my dad. Unsure of where we were going just sure that we were supposed to be going there. I remembered calling my mom five weeks into the first quarter, unsure of what she was doing, just sure that she would answer.
•
The female Gulper Eel’s mouth is the largest in the animal kingdom. She sits at the bottom of the world with her mouth hanging open, waiting for small creatures to swim inside her gaping jaw. Since the 1970’s, hundreds of Gulper Eels have been thrust up to the surface in deep sea fishing nets.
She lives a life of peace and ease, until, suddenly, she is lifted from her world of black skies. As she grasps for breath, she feels sunshine for the first time. As she fries in the heat, she listens to the radio. She always believed aliens were real.
Before I got a flight back to the bay area I wandered through campus for the first time since graduation. I always knew college would be more red solo cups and cigarette butts than classes. The grey Washington sky hung over my head like the tapestry that used to hang on the ceiling of my freshman dorm.
I walked past the humanities building. I had the sudden desire to live through everything again. To remember what it was like to sit alone on the steps leading up to the classrooms or fall asleep in a twin bed next to a snoring roommate or drink bad vodka outside of a seven-eleven, confident that it would be the beginning of a good night.
I thought of my first real apartment. I thought about waking up at noon and wandering downstairs. Pouring hot water into my French press, rolling a joint, and sitting down in front of a large window shining light on my typewriter. Letting records spin all afternoon, until I got hungry enough to make a Hot Pocket.
I remembered how easy it was to sleep past my 9am class. I remembered letting the ash fall on the carpet. I remember strolling down to the garage to play piano in nothing but a bathrobe and admiring the line of empty beer bottles along the top of the instrument. I remembered the feeling that life would always be that simple.
•
The blobfish looks nothing like a blob. She exists so far beneath the world, that most creatures would crack under the pressure. Most creatures’ insides would suffocate and implode. But her flesh is light enough to fly, 7000 miles beneath the clouds.
In her fourth year she is trapped inside of a fishing net and pulled up to the surface. Her body undergoes a transformation. The rapid change in pressure makes her entire being decompress, so when she is finally pulled out of the waves she resembles a completely different fish.
She always believed death would mean a slow rise towards a new light.
As a chain-smoker with barbed wire tattoos cuts her open, she whispers a small prayer, excited to be face to face with God.
•
When I got back to the bay area I remembered how depressed I was.
My girlfriend was working full time and I was still selling Nora Roberts and Nicholas Sparks to old white women behind the counter of the bookstore.
I’d left college with a degree in English, hopeful to get a job working in publishing. Somewhere. In between helping customers find Michelle Obama’s new book and shelving more copies of The Handmaid’s Tale a coworker who still played high school soccer told me that she would never consider leaving college until she had a “real job” all set up.
When I got home, or to my parents’ home, I was greeted by a few more rejection letters, one acceptance letter from a journal I’d never heard of in Missouri, and my mother’s terrible cooking.
I thought about running away.
I ran away once when I was eleven. I made it all the way to a Jack-in-the-Box two towns over before I called my dad. He bought me French fries before driving me home.
•
The American Girl can go 85 hours without diet coke. She can kick a soccer ball, and play electric guitar, and break every boy in her geometry class’s heart. She drives a car and looks for jobs on ZipRecruiter. She feels judged constantly by people who don’t need to use ZipRecruiter anymore because they spend their days in office buildings.
One day, she gets an interview. For a publishing company. That pays good money. She wears a Marc Jacobs suit to her interview and feels good about herself. She gets the job.
Her first day is the day she realizes she’s made it. She’s done it. She graduated from college. She has a full-time job. The apartment she just started renting with her girlfriend overlooks skyscrapers. As she sits behind the desk, in a sun filled office, surrounded by smiling people and books, feeling completely miserable, she thinks: being “successful” just means staying behind this desk, until someone pulls me out of the ocean.
She opens a google search tab on her new work computer. She types in: female angler fish.
Anita Levin is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist from San Francisco, California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Lifted Brow, Barnhouse, Lunch Ticket, The Lindenwood Review, and others. She has worked as a bookseller for an independent bookshop, a poetry editor for a literary magazine, and she currently works in publishing.
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