./~ this hole inside ~\.

[chess]

She sat on the bank of the river, and took notes.

Today I am a goldfish. I am swimming in a small bag, probably made of cheap plastic. It's very likely that I will run out of air, and then I will be a dead goldfish. It's hard to tell if I will float or not; dead fish float to the surface, but so do dead people, after a while at least.

Some people assumed she was a poet. Some people assumed that she was homeless. Some people believed that she had great and wonderous thoughts, sitting there and gazing at the water.

I don't think goldfishes wonder very much, so maybe I am a platypus instead. But a platypus wouldn't fit into a plastic bag that a little girl could carry. And I am very sure about the bag, and quite sure about the little girl. It simply doesn't make sense to be anything but a goldfish. But I wonder.

From time to time, people would give her things. A coin or two. Maybe a sandwich. She would always thank them very politely, if a little distantly. Some people came away saying that there was no depth to her eyes. Some people said that maybe she was a ghost.

It's hard to tell what a fish should think. I mean, people have looked at the brains of fish, and they say that the fish can't think much at all, because they don't have any room to do their thinking in. But they say the same thing as birds, and everyone knows that birds are wise, or at least sensible. It's all there in their eyes.

Her clothes were not in the least bit ragged; faded, perhaps, like curtains that have seen too much sun, but complete and fresh, even so. Some people said that this was because she never moved, which was not true in the slightest; bright moving things, like kingfishers, would hold her attention, and sometimes she would chase them a little way down the bank.

That's another thing they say about fish - the beady eyes. Oh, and the twenty second attention spans. There are all kinds of jokes about needing the right size of goldfish bowl - maybe it's memories, then, instead. But I don't have a bowl - just a bag. It doesn't take much time to swim around a bag, but it's always moving, so it doesn't matter.

She doesn't wear shoes. Her feet are the only part of her that is dirty.

The thing with little girls is, though, they don't have much attention either. Or much memory, I suspect. Even for the things they are carrying.

I hope she doesn't drop me.

There's poison ivy, down by the bank, but it doesn't seem to affect her.

So today I am sitting here - swimming here - floating here - and hoping that the girl does not drop me.

When she had finish a note, sometimes she would float it down the river. People picked the notes out, occasionally; it looked like writing, but you could never be quite sure. It certainly wasn't English, or even the Roman alphabet. Some people had taken the notes to the local college, once, and some clever person had said that it was definitely a language that was being written, but there wasn't enough information to decode it. He came and talked to her for a while, but she was polite and distant, and wouldn't quite meet his eyes, so he went away again.

There is not much hope, for a goldfish. I am falling.

Two young college students were sat on the bench by the river. They each held much more interest for each other than the girl who sat by the river did. The police asked them, later, what they remembered, but they had just seen her one moment, and not the next, and assumed she'd wandered off down the bank somewhere, like she did sometime.

They hauled her body out of the water before it had the chance to float.