Somewhere lately I read -‘Sven the Cod.’ I don’t know where I read it; I’ve googled but come up with nothing. If there’s something out there entitled’ Sven the Cod’ and I am misappropriating, I apologize. Let me know and I’ll change his name.
In the meantime, Sven the Cod has been living in my brain.
…
Sven was neither a sexy nor glorious fish. He left that to orcas and Mandarin fish. Sven was an older cod with whiskers, scales, beat up places where he had bumped into stuff, plus a terrific scar from the time he tangled with a grumpy mother octopus. Although, to be fair, as time passed Sven accepted that that mêlée had been his own fault. Some males eventually do grow into an understanding that, yes, sometimes they are boors around women who have a lot more on their minds than the egos of males.
Anyways, the formidable thing about Sven was this. He read. He read Twitter (he rarely called it X). He scrolled Instagram, mostly looking at political stuff though he really enjoyed the AI cats in overalls. He didn’t do TikTok because cod are afraid of Chinese misappropriation. Sven read the Atlantic, of course, plus whatever newspaper articles he could get without a paywall. He read Heather Cox Richardsen and the Columbia Journalism Review. He belonged to a local Facebook group of fish who tried to represent for justice issues, though it was hard because they had to stay underwater which meant their opinions were seen by very few.
Sven would read the dire news and then he would get up out of his fish bed and swim round and round in agitated circles. He wanted to fix life on earth yet, it seemed, all he could do was angrily slap his tail at trash, hum loudly, worry, and care. Especially care. He cared all the time. Some of comrades would lift their fishy eyebrows at him and suggest, “You don’t need to read it all, Sven. Life is short, enjoy the currents still left to you before the panko hits.”
But Sven could not stop caring. In his opinion civilization was being taken over by egregious politicians and the solipsistic billionaires who owned them. All of them, he mumbled to himself and anyone else who would listen, were anchor worms, flukes, and toxic bacterial infections on the starry velvet skin of the cosmos.
And then one morning as he was reading the news, he read the worst news yet. The current administration was about to lift most limits on the outflowing effluents of the chemical and fertilizer companies that stretched along the waterway where he lived. One factory CEO was secretly recorded as gushing, “Glyphosates are coming home, Baby!”
Sven stopped swimming. He literally stopped wriggling, stopped swishing his fins, his massive head stilled and his gills barely rippled as he absorbed the news that this time the doom was coming to his home. Because, as any well-read cod knows, where chemicals run a fish’s world is done.
He drifted all morning as fellow fish were beginning to hear the news from their sources and their water world became silent. No one knew what to say. No one knew what to do.
Some fish who knew Sven read a lot swam to him to ask the eternal questions of hope and hopelessness. “What can we do? The chemicals will be here within weeks. Can we stop it? Do we have to move? How do we know where to go?”
Sven shook his head. No simple answers.
And then, slowly, he began to become angry. “Why is it I know how bad everything is but no one ever told me what to do? Why have I been reading minutes and hours and days of my life and yet the only political action I know comes from people who are already safe? Or people with access to power? Why did I learn how to read but not how to act?”
And then, boom, he jerked his dorsal fins to make them pop and flip. He splashed sideways like a reckless racecar swerving a tight corner in a deep puddle. He faced the smaller fish who were watching him with wide eyes.
“All I know is that we can’t do nothing. So what we ought to do is the best and craziest stuff we know how to do. We are fish filled with surprises. They think we are swimming meat; we will show them, and ourselves, how much more we are.
“Spread the word. On Sunday we are going to gather in front of those death spray-arama factories. Anyone who knows anyone with a human voice and access to media, tell them to be on shore to watch all of us be our wildest and bravest selves. We will swim as close as we can to shore; we will be as loud and confusing as we can be. And By God and by Gum, we are fish! We know something about teasing, tantalizing, and obfuscating.”
“What?”
“We will make them think they have us but then we will swerve and splash and give them all the gusto we have. But first, fish friends, we have to lift up and acknowledge not just the skills all of us have, but also the unusual and rambunctious talents some of us have.”
Conversations began. Fish folks were surprised to discover how many things, among them all, they had learned to do. Older dolphins had (who knew?) choreographed a dolphin leap-a-thon set to Bob Marley’s ‘Stop That Train.’ Young dolphins dove and streaked to ‘Big Fish Theory’ by Vince Staples. No one new exactly how it pertained but that, Sven said, was the point. Not rearranging their loves and lives for the sake of “the man.” This was to be a gathering of the talent and passion of who they, the fish, were.
A fish named Wanda said, shyly, that she had learned to fly a kite. There was a little girl who fished every weekend with her parents except she did not like to catch living things so her parents gave her small kite and, Wanda rambled on breathlessly, no humans knew this part. The little girl had allowed Wanda to hold the kite string in her mouth. The fish were astonished at this marvelous feat and soon, who knows how, several dozen fish were flying small kites in air currents as they swam in water currents.
There were lobsters who knew how to do the Macarena. Dozens of older fish from Slow Currents Assisted Living could follow each other nose to tail, nose to tail, cutting slow silver swaths through the water.
Fish talked. Crustaceans clacked and clapped. Everyone laughed as many learned to do new and impossible things that some already knew. They were having more fun than they’d ever had. They were more than existing, they were learning and moving. Sven listened to the music, the bubbles, the booms of distant whales and tinkles of shrimp with teeny tap shoes on ALL their tiny feet. He was amazed that inside his ordinary fellow beings was this flow of lively life, derring-do, imagination, and swishy energy.
Sunday came. Several dozen people were lined along the shoreline as the fish with kites began the show with their little kites of pink, royal blue, rainbows, cartoon guys, and painted flowers. The kites polka-ed and waltzed over the water as humans, astonished, lifted their phones to take pictures and send them to everyone they knew.
Within an hour reporters, children, more reporters, old folks, TV crews, nervous conglomerate bozos, short buses filled with absolutely glorious humans, some drones from FOX and TMZ, and Pope Leo (by zoom of course) were there and more were gathering.
The Epic Ichthyic Talent Show of Earth’s Positively Piscatorial Pals ended in triumph as every fish and sea guy from near and far leaped from the water and flying fish flew over with a gauzy net fitted put in opalescent scales that read, “Don’t Poison Us & Don’t Poison You”
…
“You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us and the world will live as one.” John Lennon
“Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.” Langston Hughes
“We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness.” Colson Whitehead, ‘The Nickel Boy’
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