This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, Longevity and Other Stories. If you are daring, why not subscribe to my newsletter (they come few and far between), and I’ll send you a PDF copy of the book?
What do you want? I’m a Piranha. I’m not real big on stream-of-consciousness garbage, so why don’t we all get to the point, am I right? You know you want to stick your hand in the tank. Come on, you know it! You want to see what it’s like to have all the flesh torn from your bones. It would only take a second, so all you gotta do is pull that sleeve up and plunge that hand in. My tank is totally warm. It’s nice! I’m one of these tropical fish, yeah. I’ve been thinking, you know, it’s not like you’re going anywhere soon or anything. We could start, you know, by talking. That’s right, that’s a delightful spot there, by the window. Maybe you might get a cup of coffee, maybe a bagel or something. I don’t know what you wanna do. Don’t even think about those legs, I’m just saying. I could rip those to shreds so fast no one would even have any idea what’s happening. I mean Jake over there, the guy who gets the coffee, he’d know and everything because he’s the one who cleans up my tank and usually feeds me before the end of the day, and dang I can’t stand it anymore.
Stick that hand in… Not even a nibble? You’re killing me here. I need something to keep the nibbles at bay, and it certainly will not be the foolish celery Jake hung in here this morning. I can tell you that. It doesn’t have the brain of an amoeba. I like my meat, my protein, and my primary sources of nutrition need to be attached to a working brain. You see the terror, the quick reactions, losing to my terrifying bite when ambushed in the wild rivers, eventually when something great like a cow or a bull comes by. Oh, my goodness, that’s great, licking jaws and attacking in a swarm, turning the water into a festival of blood and guts and bone is such a miraculous thing, that I couldn’t even describe anything so delightful as that.
No? Tell me, folks, what do I need to do? Is there something I can use to entice you inside my wonderful abode here? My heater is on. I’d like to think that maybe a bagel and a cup of coffee later and maybe we can get to know each other just a little better. Come on, don’t leave me hanging here, I know you’re probably going to the bathroom or something, and that’s all, but you can’t deny you want to reach into this tank and see if the rocks are real or just what. You know? Right here, pull that sleeve up, and try it. The rocks are real; I swear. I’ll only bite just a finger. I’ll leave the rest.
Come one, come all, show up to see the world’s only number one talking, thinking Piranha. I’ll bet I can beat your pants off playing chess on that coffee table there by the fire, if I win, then you gotta stick something in here for me to eat, and I’m talking raw food here, something that you can’t just get at Schmendrick’s on the corner. No chop sirloin for me, no sir. No, the taste of flesh that still has blood running through it. You know how it splatters and everything all over you like on the perfect tile floors, like you, know, like god intended, and everything. The blood just gets everywhere. It’s all I think about all day, while people come in here day after day and buy coffee and bagels and maybe some of those little cheesy knot things. You know? And parfaits, they buy those in the afternoon and more coffee, and they keep on until Jake, cleaning up at night, gives me a hamburger he got from down the street. It’s nice and all, I’ll certainly eat it and everything, but oh how I’d love something fresh. It’s like a bird, a cockroach, maybe a mouse? Could I have a mouse? Jake, people keep snakes as pets and feed them mice all the time. You could feed me a mouse too, right? It would be the greatest thing I’d ever eaten, but please, could I have it alive? So I could feel it squirm, so I could sense the twitch of its feet as it figured out I was going to close my razor-sharp jaws on it. Please, Jake? Come on, I can see you over there getting your stuff together, trying to clean up another pathetic excuse for a living soul who ever bumped into my tank to be eaten by the best fish who ever swam the planet Earth. Somebody with the sense of an unintelligent mammal is going to have to blunder this way, and I’m going to tear ‘em into incredibly tiny pieces. And that’s going to be that for them.
Jake wiped down a corner of the floor where someone spilled a cup of mocha decaf a little while ago. How could he just ignore e like that? He’s got to have headphones on or something. I’ve heard of that, headphones. I don’t know what they are, but I’m pretty sure it involves keeping dimwits like this guy from hearing me. Yeah, that has to be it. There’s no other way that works.
After an audible flush, a lady came into view. She took a gander at my tank, then turned and stood in line, like I wasn’t there at all. What have I got, a sign on me that says useless fish? I know that ain’t there because I can still give the kids a scare. I know they can see these teeth because I can’t close my mouth all the way; you know? She’s just standing there. I don’t know what it is. The appeal of bagels, and coffee? Look at them all, lined up and everything, they get little chocolate things, whatever they are, Jake will never give me one, and they buy cookies and pick out baked goods from behind the little counter, and they chit chat and read newspapers. They sometimes look at their phones.
What’s a phone?
I mean, the very concept makes no sense to me. Talking to people? I think it’s strange that everyone who looks at one of these devices seems to do something different with it. Here I sit, yacking all day, and nobody ever talks to me. I haven’t seen a fish I didn’t eat in longer than I can remember. I swear. I don’t know what she’s ordered, but it looks like she’s been standing there longer than anyone else all day. They can’t seem to get enough smoked salmon to please her. I could go for some smoked salmon. Truth is if it’s meat, and it’s not hamburger right now, I think that would be the biggest treat of all time. It’s just been so long. I was thinking though about the chairs in the front window, and how I know the algae would bloom, but wouldn’t my tank be that much better, more of a spectacle in the front window like that? I think it would make the place look great, but it would also mean that I could chase kids running up and down the sidewalk outside. On one side of us there’s a children’s hair salon, and on the other side is an ice cream shop, and having any children to eat, I mean that would be so nice.
She’s checking out. That’s a bag large enough for an army. It’s got to have twenty bagels in it. She’s also carrying a large tray with two boxes of coffee, sort of cardboard containers.
“Jake?”
“Yes?”
“Can you help me out with these, into the back of my car?”
“Sure.”
He took the coffee jugs and helped her, leaving his mop and bucket behind. The air outside was crisp. Jake stepped down to the parking lot from the street and carefully laid the coffee jugs into her back seat. I swam there, watching it all. They were talking, arguing. For just a couple of normal people, not about to be eaten, it got pretty frantic for just a moment. And then, she slammed the door and came back into the shop and came right up to me.
“I don’t care what anybody in here thinks. You have got to chill out and be a fish, for god’s sake. Stop swimming around, and trying to eat everyone who comes by! It’s not good, and you could be a little nicer to him.”
Jake stood behind her.
What?
“Yes, I can hear every crazy thought that streams out of your stupid piranha skull. Now, apologize to this dude for taking such good care of you. Hamburger every night… Do you know he loves to get treats for you, and it’s the best he could find?”
About the…
“No. Nothing alive. It would foul your water way too much. Leave well enough alone. You don’t need a rat’s skull stopping up your pump, or fragments of it, so calm down, okay?”
Right.
I swam from side to side.
She pulled up her hoodie and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, so you be nice.” Then she drove away.
Jake finished mopping the floor. It was always kind of a sleepy time for me. Later in the evening, after dark, when regular people were in restaurants or at home, and the rest of them were going through the takeout window, he came in with a hamburger for me. He cut it in half with a plastic knife and dropped it in, one half at a time.
I tore into it with force. To me, it was the best hamburger I’d ever seen in my life. I shook it, and shook it, tearing at it with my ragged line of fangs, and chewed, gulping down great swaths of meat in every bite. I did my best to pick up the scraps, but there were a lot of meat particles floating in the water.
It required a water change.
Jake got out a hose and bucket and drew some of the cloudy water out, then he slowly refilled it with water he had already prepared for me.
So grateful for the glorious snack, I swam to the bottom and did not attack Jake’s hand, as he reached in to scrub my glass.
Jake, I’d never bite, never.
It stormed outside. Jake, who was last to leave, turned to me before he locked the door for the night. “For the record, I can hear everything you say, too.”
Everything?
“Every bloody detail. I love having a pet piranha. How many can say that? And one I can talk to, well, I’ll see you later.”
Then I was on my own. The lights were down; the place was reset for tomorrow. Kids would come by again in the morning.
I was ready.
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