Dimmi noticed a splash of color somewhere deep in the mass of flopping flounder. He slackened the net and some of the fish spilled out over the deck. The other men shouted in annoyance but he found what he was looking for: two feet long, round as a keg, with rudimentary segmented limbs sharing space with dorsal and pectoral fins, bright green eyes on either side of its bloated head, a squashed snout like a boxer’s nose. He hauled it out and placed it on ice in a garbage can.
         Later in his cabin he examined it more closely. It had personality, this one. The face, ruptured from the decompression, seemed to sneer at him, a Sid Vicious fish. It smelled of rotten salt and citrus. He took some pictures and sent them to a friend. He stored it in a cooler and slept for a few hours before the next shift.
         The friend responded while Dimmi slept: Lots of damage, but what a green! I wonder what it looked like when it was alive.
         Dimmi worked hard and he usually slept dreamlessly, but not tonight. Tonight he swam in green depths, among needlelike spires and tumbled cyclopean stones, a city ruined yet somehow intact. Underneath the silt and clay and radioactive iron, he knew to his comfort, beat a heart the size of the moon.
         In the morning he ate the eyes of the fish and cut gills into the sides of his neck. When the other men found him he was flopping on the cabin floor, vomiting seawater and gasping out his last. As the other men crossed themselves and stepped back, Alex ran to him and tried to stop his bleeding. Drooping and deflating on Dimmi’s cot, the fish watched eyelessly and dead. When the men threw it back into the sea it drifted downward for hours before regaining its proper face and life.
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