The Fish
Peer at the fish; the fish comprehend you briefly and let go. Their thoughts, part of a school, are complex because they belong to none of them individually. When you pull one out of the water it gapes in the silence of the unthinking air. You toss it back; the great fish mind goes “Wow!” and it scatters, thinking, thinking, thinking.
We don’t talk about how much we’re like them when we’re asleep. Awake we always think we’re so alone; we go to sleep longing to tell someone of what we’ve seen.
Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s writing can be found in X-Ray, The Pinch, Roi Fainéant, Heavy Feather Review and The Offing. His short story "Taylor Swift" won the Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast, and his story "Goodwill" was picked as one of the Wigleaf Top Fifty Very Short Fictions. A collection of prose poems and microfiction, Animal Children, was published by Nomadic/Black Lawrence Press. He teaches writing and literature at California College of the Arts.
You can see more of Hugh's work in 11.4 and 11.4 and 5.2 and 5.2 and 2.4 and 1.1