The spring stood on top of a peak, on top of a mountain, on top of everything, and in the spring swam the very small fish, and they spoke of what they would do and who they would be.
“I’m going to be a shark,” said the first fish. “I’ll swim all over the world, and I’ll eat anything I want.”
“I’m going to be a gulper eel,” said the second fish. “I’ll live at the bottom of the world and I’ll eat anything I want.”
“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish.
“I’m going to be a flying fish,” said the fourth fish. “I’ll swim through the air, not just the water.”
“I’ll be a leaping salmon,” said the fifth fish, and so on and on and on for the spring was full from one side to the other, as big as it was, as small as they all were.
But small things grow ever bigger, and one Now not too far from Then when the sun shone particularly brightly a little fish swam uncommonly close to the very edge of the spring, and – as much by design as accident – it slipped into the whirling current of one of the ten thousand streams that shot forth from the spring, and it was gone.
The first fish to follow it took about four minutes. The first fish to follow THAT fish took about four seconds. And on, and on, and on, until it was a flood, a tide of little flesh with big dreams and wild hope and fierce fear all pouring out of the spring at every turn, descending down into the world on the ten thousand streams that fed into a hundred thousand rivers that drained into the oceans.
The first, second, and fourth fish were gone before then – seized on by hungry and long-bodied and long-toothed river predators. The fifth fish was plucked by a small but determined bird.
The third fish didn’t know what to do.
***
Some of the fish remained in the rivers, found their ways into lakes, stopped to tarry in pools and ponds. They grew up, put down roots, stayed as lampreys, as trout, as bass, as sunfish and cichlids and pike and every colour and form and imagining of the oxbow, from murky thousand-mile meanders to cold clear crisp mountain craters that seemed just a little bit like the echo of the spring they had spent their childhoods in, the spring that they had forgotten.
The remainder found their way out into the rest of the world, the bulk of the planet’s surface, the conquering of topography by hydrology. They flooded the estuaries, clotted the corals, meandered into the great pelagic deserts, sank down to the abyssal plains and into the hadal trenches, moved up and down the water column like dust in sunbeams, grew white-bellied and black-backed, shaded the colours of the rainbow, turned thin and long and stout and strong and bright-eyed and blind and beautiful in every way.
The third fish didn’t know where to go.
***
Of the billions, so few were left to grow all the way up. One in thousands, hundreds, millions, who could count them? Most of those lucky few were small, discreet, quiet and quick and worried and a little bit more like their childhood than they might have thought they’d be. Some were larger, some were larger still, a few were largest of all – great sharks that cruised through vast clouds of tiny life and swallowed them whole; or knife-toothed predators that swallowed seals and dolphins. They too found themselves not quite who they thought they’d be; wary, hungry, eternally restless and fretful and just a little wistful for a childhood in a high and safe place that they could not recall.
The third fish didn’t know who to be.
***
The spring filled again. Every year, every revolution of the sun, every passing cloud and empty breeze and idle hour poured more into it, until at last it was overflowing with very small fish, still fresh, still amorphous, still eager and still unknown.
And when the hastiest of that year’s young swam too far from the spring’s center, too close to the current tugging at its fins, too close to the stream – it found the oddest thing. A little lump in the riverbed, a spot of piled sediment, an obstruction forming itself into a stone. The new fish didn’t know what it was but that was normal, and natural, and fine, and so it put it out of its head and soon it pressed on.
Every year more debris piled; every year it packed in more tightly; every year the stone grew in size and scope until the waterway was cut in half by its mass and the number of streams that flowed out from the spring was ten thousand and one.
The very small fish followed the streams to the rivers and lakes and the ocean, and they did not know what the stone was. But some stayed longer than their friends every year, just a moment. And the fish that lingered there swam more slowly for a time, with more worries to weigh them down.
***
The ages passed, and the stone grew. It grew and grew and grew until it forced streams to merge, then to stop, then finally half the spring was obstructed, clogged tight by its bulk. The very small fish slid unevenly from the mountaintop now, and the rivers and seas of the world were unevenly filled save for in places where the base of the stone cracked and permitted small tunnels and trickles to worm underneath its bulk and funnel down the mountainside in sharp short leaks.
In one such crevice on one such day of one such year swam a little fish, sooner than it had planned – it was not yet time for the rush down the seven thousand streams, but the stone had swollen so that it was impossible to avoid it even before the time to leave came, and a small bit of curiosity led it down a passage it couldn’t possibly back out of. But it was far too little a fish to understand or fear this, and so it went down, down, down into the depths of the stone, through passages bigger fish had never swum, and at the very heart of the stone, so far in that the rush and spray of the streams was inaudible for the first time in that little fish’s life, it heard the voice of the third fish.
“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish. It said this in the terrible sort of way that comes with having thought it endless times before, until the thought wears away and the words mean nothing and all that’s left is raw and red.
“Would you like to come outside?” asked the little fish.
“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish.
“Would you like to not be in here?” asked the little fish.
“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish. And, “yes.”
The little fish swam and slammed and shoved with all its small force against the walls around it, but it was only a very little fish and so it was unable to do much at all.
“I’m going to go away now,” said the little fish at last, “but I’ll come back. And when I come back, I’ll help you. Is that alright?”
“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish. And, “okay.”
***
The little fish was very excited to speak with its friends after that.
“I am going to be an enormous shark,” said the little fish. “So that I can come back to the spring and break the stone wide open.”
“A shark can’t swim all the way back up the seven thousand streams!” said its little fish friends. “You’re nuts.”
“Well then, I’ll be a mighty salmon,” said the little fish. “So that I can leap upstream from the ocean all the way here and break the stone wide open.”
“A salmon isn’t nearly big enough to break that stone open,” said its little fish friends. “You’re weird.”
“Well then,” said the little fish, “I’ll figure it out myself. Just you wait.”
“That’s really strange,” said its little fish friends. And then near the edge of the spring one of the boldest very small fish was caught by the current and swam down, down, down the mountainside, and so the conversation was, unbeknownst to its participants, already almost over.
***
The little fish was so fiercely intent upon its mission that it was too distracted to notice all the danger of its journey, and so made it all the way to the sea without so much as a scratch. And only then did it realize – so fiercely intent, again, on its mission – that it had precisely no idea as to what its mission was.
“I could be a shark, and split the stone wide open” it said, but then it remembered its friends’ objections to that, and hesitated. “Or maybe a salmon, so I could reach the stone again?” it thought, and it recalled its friends’ objections to that too. “Maybe if I were half shark and half salmon,” it thought daringly, but then it realized that was not a good idea, and it despaired for a moment in a half-hearted little fishy way.
“Oh!” it thought then, so hard that it said it aloud. “I can simply ask a shark and a salmon for help!”
This took longer than the little fish had thought it would, and during the course of this it learned several new things, such as that many sharks were hungry or busy and salmon weren’t much less so. “Excuse me-” and “Would you mind-” and “Please, if you have a moment-” were all fine enough ways to begin a conversation, but the conclusions of those conversations always seemed to converge in headlong flight.
So instead the little fish thought to itself for a while, and it thought of how it had gotten an answer from the third fish, and it began with a very different sort of question to the next shark it found – a handsome sort of oceanic whitetip, with the customary dour mouth and mournful attitude of its type.
“Are you alright?” the little fish asked.
The whitetip didn’t blink, because it couldn’t. But if it could’ve, it would’ve. “What do you mean?” it asked. It didn’t lunge at the little fish; oceanic whitetips don’t lunge. They just stubbornly come at you over and over again until you’re food. But the little fish didn’t know this, and took the lacking lunge as a good omen.
“Do you need any assistance?”
“My back has parasites on it. Can you fix that?”
“I can try,” said the small fish. And indeed, over the course of many days, it did just that. It was a funny sort of way to get food, but consistent, and when the shark began to be mostly-clean (“cleaner than I’ve felt in years”) it was gracious enough to share the scraps of its food, since crumbs for an oceanic white-tip were pretty good meals for a little fish. By the time the shark was clean it was quite reluctant to part from the little fish.
“I will come back,” it promised the shark, “but I would like some help from you first, if that’s alright. I need to destroy the stone at the spring. Can you do that?”
“Not me,” said the white-tip. “And I have no idea of what this spring you’re talking about is. But I know a few friends of my friends. I’ll send them to the nearest river-mouth come spring, if you can give them direction.”
“Oh good,” said the little fish. And it left, and it was so pleased with itself that it immediately introduced itself to another shark, who asked much the same of it, and before it was done cleaning THAT shark it was beset with requests from a third, and so on, and on, and on.
***
Spring found many decidedly clean sharks lurking at the river mouths, along with a number of curious salmon who might not have been particularly keen to listen to the little fish but were cautiously interested in doing so when a shark was lurking behind its request. The sharks were bull shark: grumpy, blunt, and as fond of river water as the white-tips were of the open waves.
“Follow me,” said the little fish, and they did – all the way down the rivers, whose greatest inhabitants hid in astonishment at the force of fish they travelled in; all the way to the edge of the seven thousand streams at the mountain’s base, where the sharks had to sit and wait; all the way past the rocks and the spray and the bright froth of the birthing edge of the spring, up into the very cauldron where they’d been born and gone and forgotten it, except for the little fish, who had a very specific thing to remember.
The stone still sat there, brooding and omnipresent, and although it certainly startled the salmon and the little fish to see it again the real attention of all the OTHER little fish – the very little fish, the very small fish – was on the newcomers, for they had never seen other fish before that were not themselves.
“Who are you?” they asked.
“Some salmon and someone looking for a friend,” replied the little fish, and it moved to the base of the stone and began to inspect it for weaknesses. There were none; the stone was perfect and untouched.
“Where are you going?” they asked.
“We’re going back to the rest of the world, once we’re done,” said the little fish as the salmon began to nudge and budge and thrash their powerful bodies against the stone. Mud churned into the gravel of the spring; it was moving, but only barely. “And we’re bringing the stone with us.”
“What are you doing?” they asked.
“We’re letting my oldest friend out,” said the little fish. “Because they’ve been trapped in there for a very long time, and I promised I would do that, and I’ve asked for help so they would do that, and I’ve given help to others so they would help me. Can you help me?”
The very small fishes of the spring were not old enough to know that was a ridiculous thing to ask, and so agreed immediately. And although every one of them was smaller than a human’s littlest fingernail, in sum and totality, they could move at least one (small, sad) mountain.
The stone slid. Not surely, not safely, not smoothly, but it slid. And when it slid, it spun, and as it spun it began to tumble, and then the water took it and everything around it – salmon, little fish, the spring’s yearly crop of very small newborns (blessedly close to leaving anyways) and all.
***
The sharks found them at the base of the mountain in the birthplace of the rivers, and found something else too: pulverized by the fall and the rush, the stone was frailer than it seemed. It crumbled away in their jaws, bite by bite, and when the last piece was gone it took the little fish a moment to even realize that the third fish was there now, naked and revealed, floating in some sort of shock.
“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish. But the words meant something different now.
“That’s alright,” said the little fish, the pilot fish. “I’ve gone to some trouble to bring you this far; it would be rude to leave you alone now. Do you mind following me for a little while, though? I owe some sharks some cleaning.”
***
Ten thousand streams ran from the spring again – messy, uncoordinated, squabbling down the side of the mountain. Above them, above the world, the next year waited.
They didn’t know to miss the stone. They didn’t know the odd pits and grooves in the spring’s bed were unusual. They didn’t know anything at all.
But they were happy, in the way of very small fishes. Even if they didn’t know it yet.