Meet Me in the Moon Room by Ray Vukcevich

Author:Ray Vukcevich [Vukcevich, Ray]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Short Stories, Fiction
ISBN: 9781618730008
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Published: 2001-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

Message in a Fish

The phone rang three more times before Josh decided it wasn’t part of the elaborate dream he was dreaming of Valerie and got up to answer it. As he stumbled into the living room, he thought the phone would almost certainly stop ringing just as he picked it up, so there was no need to hurry. He had time to run through a short list of people who might be calling him at a time like this: someone else had died, probably Aunt Eppie, or maybe it was a collections guy—Josh hadn’t made payments on anything in months, or a wrong number, or a crank call—some serious heavy breathing or Prince Albert in a can (or maybe it would be Valerie calling from the Starship. See? I’m not so dead after all!). He picked up the phone, and said hello.

“So, you the guy with the fish?”

“What?” Josh stood on one foot so he could pick the other one up off the cold wooden floor. In the dark, the hum and splash of his fish tanks sounded like a creek cascading over smooth rocks. It might be a chilly night in the rain forest along the Rio Negro—were there ever any chilly nights in South America? And what was this about a fish?

Oh yeah, the fish. His classified would have appeared in today’s paper. Good god, why was he still in bed? He pushed the little button on the side of his watch and saw that it was four-thirty in the morning. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Have you mistaken me for the Time Lady?” The caller sounded like a man Josh wouldn’t want to get to know. “Did you advertise the fish or not?”

“I did,” Josh said. “I just didn’t expect people to be calling up in the middle of the night. And who’s the Time Lady?”

“Just how many people do you think will be calling at all for an item like this?”

“Lots!” Josh said. Who wouldn’t be fascinated by Cosmo? He was a beautiful and very rare fish. To see him was to love him. If things had not been so very desperate, Josh would not have placed the classified at all, but now that he had, he was sure people would be lining up around the block just to get a look. Josh would have to sell tickets, maybe hold an auction. It was not like such fish were falling out of the sky.

“In your dreams,” the caller said.

“Are you sure you know what we’re talking about here? If you’re just looking for something to swim around and look pretty, maybe you should try your local pet shop.”

“What I want to know is does it have lips yet?” the caller asked.

Okay, clearly the man knew which way the wind was blowing. Only people familiar with the Top Hat Fish would ask about the lips, and not only the lips themselves, but the timing of their appearance. An amateur would have asked about the hat.

“He’s just getting lips,” Josh said.

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