Harold Finds a Fish

[Enguin Enguin Enguin Enguin]

As a child Harold had stayed inside at lunchtime at school to read, and only read non-fiction books for fear of overexcitement. This wasn't his natural mentality, but his mother was overbearing and with his father dead he wanted only to please her. And so Harold moulded himself into a rather dull man in his thirties, at the age of seven.

 

By the time he actually was in his thirties, he found himself at a loss as to what to do with himself. His mother died when he was twenty-four, and he had no extended family that he had ever met. Born with a unibrow and a disregard for self-maintenance, he had grown into quite the repugnant human being in both physical appearance and personality.

 

Inevitably he ended up with a mundane 9-5 dead-end office job and a rickety old car to take him to and from his dingy inner-outer-city bungalow and the pair of cats he poorly looked after. Days passed in dozens at a time, little of note occuring and nobody to tell it to even if it did. Suicide was pondered often, and it was such thoughts that led Harold to the local off-license.

 

Alcohol numbed him to the excruciating mundanity of his existence, and simultaneously dulled his darkest thoughts. He was by no means an alcoholic, but when he did drink he would really drink. Doubtless, the fact that nobody else was ever there to preach moderation played its part.

 

And so Harold stood in the aisle, slack-jawed and unshaven with his clothes unwashed and his shoelaces untied, looking cartoonishly repulsive and smelling worse still. He picked up a bottle of whiskey and was absently reading the label when in the corner of his eye he saw a strange shimmer. Turning his gaze, Harold observed a strange portrusion between two bottles. On closer inspection he realised it was the tailfin of a fish.

 

His curiosity piqued, Harold carefully moved the bottles apart to verify the legitimacy of the fishes presence. Knowing nothing about wildlife Harold couldn't hope to identify the fish, but it was shimmering and silver and its eyes were darting and... its eyes were human?

 

Harold should have felt fear and revulsion, but instead he felt joy and excitement. When the fish looked at him, it was as if he was the only.man on earth and he felt a jubilation he couldm't have ever imagined, an understanding that this... creature, could impart knowledge beyond previous human conception. Harold could become the world's most intelligent and influential and affluent man.

 

Whatever this was, it would be a big deal. So taken was he by fantasies of fame and fortune that he didn't notice, or rather didn't register, the teenage boy beside him eyeing the fish curiously before pocketing it and leaving.

 

The jingle of the doorway chimes as the boy left brought him back to reality, and realising now that his one shot at a decent life was disappearing into the background he burst from the off-license onto the near deserted street. The boy was nowhere to be seen, and there were at least a half a dozen places he could have gone.

 

And then even if he found him, so what? He had no claim to the fish. He could kill him and take it, but what good would that really do him? Could his conscience even bear the weight of taking a life? And even then, the boy didn't deserve to die simply for being more impulsive.

 

Resigned to his reality, Harold dragged himself through fourty-six more years of repetitive, lonely, depressing eixstence in the faint hope of finding that same fish again. He never did.

[mitchermitcher]

Nice autobiography, 'Harold'.

[Enguin Enguin Enguin Enguin]

Nice autobiography, 'Harold'.

Thanks "Brenda".