There were many other kinds of fish in el Estanque, as many and various as there were ways to go into debt! There were goldfish, koi, clown loaches, and pacus, not to mention quahog clams, crabs and lobsters, octopuses of every size and alligator gar as long as your nieta. But try sometime to tell a rich person that money will not solve their problems if you want to waste your life. Pescafication was a compromise between herself, the debtor, and los Matadores, who watch from beyond the sky and decide who lives and who dies and what shape they must take meantime. Instead, she talked her tongue to chalk attempting to explain the numinous nature of rarework. They tried to bribe the pretty, young guardiana del Acuario Real to give them a shape more robust and alarming, like that of the gurry shark or the bowhead whale or the bigmouth buffalo. Some nobles thought the cichlid beneath them, however. Their lifespans ranged from eight to ten years if you couldn’t clear your debts in a decade, well, you were never going to clear them, were you? But the wise and studied conspired to become convict cichlids, as these fish were hardy and long-lived. If you didn’t have a better thought in your head, you became a cod. The most popular fish, naturally, was cod, because everybody knew what that was. The executioner was comfortable expressing herself in contradictions.īut it was not as if Estrella did not enjoy learning a lot about fish. “Your grace” was what was what the executioner had called her ever since the day they met-Estrella at age six, the executioner who knew how old? It was both a tease and an honorific. She thought she would be learning how to transform murderers into birds-like a proper executioner-not debtors into fish.īut, as her mentor told her, “Well, your grace, even an executioner has to start somewhere.” When Estrella first came to apprentice under the executioner, she was surprised to be given as her first duty charge over el Estanque. It would be one of the last things you read with human eyes if you were drowning in debt and unable to pay your way back to breathable air. It was engraved right there on the marble facade. “El Estanque” was just how it was commonly known-the name mothers used to frighten fractious children: “Behave, diablito, or I’ll pitch you into el Estanque!” leg-breakers to warn delinquent gamblers: “It’s either your kneecaps or a stint at el Estanque!” or words of warning whispered in the dimly-lit Mariposan lupanars: “Not that one, love his one true mistress is el Estanque, who eats every coin he makes.” The proper name of el Estanque, the one by which every prodigal noble of the court of Reina Tenebra knew and feared it, was el Acuario Real para los Deudores y Pobres de la Isla de las Mariposas. She looked after the morosely pop-eyed fish who used to be debtors, cleaned their tanks, changed their water, and shook earthworms and shrimp meal over their pools at dawn and at twilight. One day, Estrella herself would be royal executioner.īut for now, she was merely el Estanque’s empress-which on most days amounted to being royal aquarium cleaner. When she was younger and far more imperious, her gifts had brought her to the attention of the royal executioner, who in time had offered her this apprenticeship. Estrella always liked to imagine herself empress of something, and she would work with whatever was in front of her. Let us turn to natural philosophy.Įstrella Santaez y Perreta was the “empress” of el Estanque. Die young if you must, for even if you live to be a hundred years old, you will die young. The eternal challenge of humanity can be summed up thusly: you are a small animal of little stature you are mortal you are scared. They are as different from humans as the butterfly is from the fly. Damiana Cardosa y Fuentes, do not die in vain, understand this: they are not human. Too long have our imaginations been limited by sea shanties that portrayed sirenas as lusty, acid-tongued wenches who (how?) learned to speak flawless Mariposan while underwater or else sly anthropovores whose songs make thralls of concupiscent mariners or any other myth that characterizes them as anything resembling us. We could not see sirenas because they are gigantic! Damiana Cardosa y Fuentes, Doctora de Filosofia Naturál From the Monograph Sirenas of Garganta by Ven.
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