Washing Dishes For The Millennium
The sink was overflowing with greasy dishes from an unremembered meal and it seemed like a good idea at the time to wash them. Or was that a bad idea? Who could tell? I decided to wash them, having only two options. But as I filled the cracked enamel sink with hot water, almost steam, the cups and saucers, plates and bowls began to move about and break apart. They fragmented into salmon-coloured, fish-shaped pieces that darted around in the dish water like pike-hunted perch.
I blinked and found myself gazing out the two-paned kitchen window. I could see dawn was arriving, or perhaps it wasn't. Who could tell? Had I been washing dishes all afternoon? All evening? In the sink the salmon continued to frolic and disintegrate into smaller and smaller fry. I thought how happy they might have been had they been real salmon, or even sardines, and able, under their own cognitive powers, to travel down the dark drain on an adventure worthy of Huck and Jim, or perhaps leap up the dripping water, into the faucet and fin their way back, through mists and times to the place of their birth. Only they didn’t, they continued to deny whatever identity they might have had and continuing dissolving into a sandy mud that covered the bottom of my sink. I remember, I was upset, my cast iron skillet wasn’t dirty. I could have put this abrasive product to productive use, as a cleanser. I watched the school of salmon fry swimming back and forth, rubbing their granular, rough-scaled bellies against the bottom of my skillet and pulled the plug. I watched the salmon disappear down the drain.
Or was that simply gritty clay?
Who could tell?
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