The ghost of the fish I ate for dinner yesterday lives in my stomach. I think it likes it, down there, where it's warm and dark. Safe, too. No one's going to kill that fish again anytime soon. For breakfast today, I had a toasted sesame bagel and spent the next hour gulping back the hungry ghost trying to swim back up my throat, lured by the smell of food.
If I'm being honest, it was not a very good dinner, but that's more my fault than the fish's. Overcooked flesh, dry and flaky; iron skin burnt with rust; lots of little needle bones still stuck between my teeth. I needed a full bowl of white rice to help choke it down. Nevertheless, I tell the fish thank-you for saving me from starvation, at least for today. The fish does not know what thank-you is. It does, however, know what rice is, and from how much it keeps tickling the skin of my belly, that is all it cares about from me.
I tried asking the fish about its life. The fish does not know what questions are, either. Yet it pokes its spectral head out of my guts, still wide-mouthed and goggly-eyed, to sing about the sea. The sea is very terrifying, to a fish. This ghost is scheduled for exorcism tomorrow; I'll remember that screaming forever.
