Thunder in a Two-Eyed StormBy Kathryn McMahon
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In the valley is a pond and in the pond is a goldfish. When the boy starts looking at you after you start looking at him, stuff bread in your pockets and walk down the mountain in search of this fish and its pond, and you’ll find it half-forgotten behind a crumbling wall of yellow sandstone. Watch as the goldfish flicks its ruby tail, and you’ll read your fortune. Whether the fish falls and rises, rises and falls—that means something different to somebody else. But should thunder crack while the goldfish blinks, your heart will break within the year. (Ears ringing, you’ll think of that boy’s eyes, how he’s there but not there enough. How if he were, you’d know the truth of their color.) If you feed the goldfish curls of bread, thick crusts or thin, it will change your fortune. The future is never locked. Not even windowless. It is a bowl into which the goldfish can swim. The fish will fan a red tail stitched with gold and dive and fetch a copper coin. (Where it gets these, no one knows. It’s not lucky to throw coins at goldfish.) If you take the coin, it might be a trap. (So, too, are those pebbles pinging your window.) The coin is said to have a horse head on one side and a statue of love on the other. Some say it has no sides, that it simply spins in the palm. When you pinch it between your fingers, it smells like blood and snow, and one face looks like the autumnal equinox, the other like a tectonic plate. If you don’t immediately return the coin, your fortune could take a turn for the worse. But the goldfish, it seems, expects you to take the coin. So take it. Tell the goldfish that you are in charge. In charge like lightning striking a fence. In charge like electricity or love scalding through your veins and into the earth. Leaving its ghostmark over your body and all that will happen to your body, all that will follow it, chase it home.
Kathryn McMahon is a queer American writer living abroad with her British wife and dog. Her work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Booth, Passages North, The Cincinnati Review, Split Lip, and others. She is the 2018-19 winner of New Delta Review’s Ryan R. Gibbs Award for Flash Fiction. Follow her on Twitter @katoscope and find more of her writing at darkandsparklystories.com.
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