CATFISH SCRATCH FEVER
Leo cursed when he dropped the second worm almost immediately after the first, glaring at the twisting pink body fading into the murky water. He lay the pole down, and let out a long sigh. He lay on his back, stretching his arms out behind his back, looking up at the clouds through the wavering heat shimmer. He closed his eyes and tried to relax. His mother’s face flashed behind his eyelids, and Leo heard her parting words all over again."You’ll end up barefoot in the street, face down in a ditch, or behind bars . . . anywhere but up. Boy, you so lazy! What would your Gramps think of you? Some way to honor his memory!" Leo sneered. Mom knew how to push his buttons, and he resented how she’d dragged his grandfather into it. He’d been close with his grandfather until his death two years ago.
He was paying his respects to Gramps on this day, his Gramps’s birthday anniversary. One thing they’d loved to do together was to fish for largemouth bass, just as Leo was doing now. If he could get the goddamn worm on the hook.
He rolled over to prop himself with his elbow and forearm. He gazed at the water for a while and then for an instant, the swirling browns clarified. As if looking through a spotless window, Leo saw the catfish.
It was an impeccable specimen. Sleek, fat, drifting against the current with a slow oscillation of its tail, the catfish hovered just a couple of inches above the bottom of the banked bed alongside the edge of the river. Leo slowly lowered himself onto his belly, and pulled himself slowly closer to the water. His mother would probably lose it over the grass and mud stains he was painting his clothes with, but he could appease her with fresh catfish for dinner. Let her tell him he was lazy, if he caught food.
The catfish was still enough that Leo believed it was asleep. He could catch it by hand. Or rather, both hands. The thing was huge. Thirty-five pounds and change, if Leo knew his fish at all. He continued to inch his way towards the drifting catfish. Leo had a moment when he thought his attempt at capture would be aborted before it even began when the shadow of his head fell across the catfish’s eyes and a spasmodic quiver move down its body. But when the catfish remained in the same spot, Leo grinned as he wormed even closer.
His abdomen muscles shook as he balanced his torso over the water, arms reaching out so that he could grab the tail and heave it over into the embankment behind him. He inhaled deeply, and plunged his hands down.
The catfish seemed to look directly at Leo, as it spun its head around to point in the boy’s direction. Quicker than Leo’s grab, it rolled several degrees so that its dorsal fin spines jabbed into Leo’s hand.
Leo yelped, and pitched forward into the water, even as the catfish vanished, swimming so fast it was a streak of shimmering brown. Spluttering and thrashing, Leo forgot he could just stand up in the shallows. Finally he remembered sheepishly clambering to his feet. He waded out, shaking his hand which already felt as if he was holding it inside a flame. Catfish venom was dangerous if untreated, and with a fish that large, Leo had gotten a substantial injection. Leo’s legs started to tremble. When Leo stared at his swollen hand, he gasped with horrified breath to see the purple, pulsating worms crawling out of the punctures.
He slapped his palm against his leg, bringing sweat to his brow with the fresh waves of pain. His heart was racing so heart it no longer beat, it buzzed with the vibration. He tried to step forward and was puzzled when he made no forward progress. Then he realized he was already on his back, pawing the air with his foot. The clouds overhead started to squirt out great billowy emissions of ink that glittered metallic in the fading sunlight.
Leo’s body convulsed and his head snapped to the side as his neck muscles strained in one direction, as if a fist inside his neck was clenching itself. He stared at the cypress trees as they pulled their roots out and began to pair off, twirling and dipping in a dance. Their roots made wet suction noises that make Leo think of sex, and indeed, the trees were rubbing against each other, their branches groping and rasping across bark. They started to fall to the ground, still groping and making sticky, moist sounds. An uncomfortable, hazy recollection rose in Leo’s mind. The silhouettes of his parents one night as he stood in the doorway, aghast at the moonlit patches of bare, sweaty skin and those strange, primitive sounds. Before his father left one day, never to be heard from again.
Leo’s neck unlocked, and he turned his eyes skyward again to see the heavens burning even as his hand did, then suddenly the sky filled with river life. Crabs skittered across the blue expanse, and different fishes darted in all directions. Leo glanced down to see he was no longer prone on the ground, but rather, buoyed up by innumerable stars. He poked one, and it flitted away, twinkling. Suddenly, all of the stars flew away from underneath Leo. Screaming, he flailed through the bottomless blackness but he could still see the starbugs gathering into a single swarm, creating a stridently buzzing comet that hurtled towards Leo.
Try as he could, Leo could not swat enough of the starbugs away, and they began to force themselves down his throat, into his nostrils. Leo cried out in silence as the swarm poured into him. From inside, they gave Leo flight once again, giving him the ability to stop his headlong descent. He turned over and over, weightless. He started at the whirling lights underneath his skin, his body a galaxy of restless stars and novae.
A massive noise broke Leo’s focus, and he turned, his skin tight at the sound. That sound always conjured up the memory of the time he’d ripped his little sister’s dress as she slipped from the rooftop that one day they were alone and he’d convinced her to join him up there. She’d broken her arm in the resulting fall, and Leo had threatened to break her other one if she told on him.
The blackness was tearing, as if it was made of the same cotton fabric of his sister’s ruined dress. As it tore, a thick liquid welled through the opening, and then began to spray and gush. Suddenly, it burst forth with a roar, and engulfed Leo in tepid dark water, the waters of the Mississippi.
The environment was distorted, and Leo puzzled over the disparity until realization came upon him- either he had shrunk, or the scale of the river setting had grown gigantic. Pebbles were enormous mesas, algae created thickets. Leo could breathe, so he remained tranquil, stroking through the water. He noted the starbugs no longer glowed under his skin. Turning over to face the sky through the rippling lens of the river surface, he saw that they were back in their proper places, in the night backdrop.
A sudden, sharp pain in his wrist flared, and Leo looked down, thinking his hand was still exhibiting the signs of being envenomed, but he saw instead that his wrist was caught fast in the grip of a crawfish large as a truck, its antennae waving and flicking against Leo’s struggling body as he tried to pry the pincers off his arm. Then a quick flurry of mud rose from the bottom, and a crab that Leo could have made a house out of rose up and crunched the crawfish into half. Leo exclaimed in disgust as he hastily shoved the dying crawfish’s claw off his arm. Blood trickled from his wound, drawing the crab’s eyestalks to Leo’s floundering. Leo went pale as the crab suddenly scuttled towards him, but then a shadow passed over his head. Leo began to paddle backwards in panic. He was nothing but food to just about everything down there, especially being as tiny as he was. He espied a large thatch of algae and some river moss, and immediately began to burrow into it for concealment.
Leo let out a sigh of relief. He grasped the strands of moss to keep from floating up above the plant mass. He didn’t squeeze his fists too hard, so he didn’t notice at first that he hands were sliding upwards over the slimy surface of the moss. He glanced up, his blood turning colder than the water surrounding him. His urine mixed with the river water as he stared at the gigantic catfish directly overhead, its mouth a vacuum that pulled Leo inexorably closer despite his grip upon the treacherously slippery plants.
Leo was startled into releasing the plant anchoring when his grandfather rose up in front of him. His Gramps’ regular kindly expression was gone; all he could see was contempt and disappointment in the elderly man’s mahogany eyes. The stooped figure pointed an arthritis-gnarled forefinger at his grandson, and uttered two words, "Wicked boy!"
Leo screamed so loud his vocal cords seized, causing him to choke and cough through pain-shredded throat tissue while he grappled wildly with the elusive strands of moss. The inevitable finally occurred, and Leo was sucked into the catfish’s gullet. All was darkness, then, for Leo.
* * * * *
Leo’s mother rubbed her temples with the wet, soapy dishrag in the vain hope that the slight coolness would appease the migraine that threatened to kick in the walls of her skull and do a jig in her brain. Her son, as wayward as he might be, still was her son, and so she worried about Leo. He had not returned home the previous night, which was quite unusual for the boy. He might show up in the wee hours, but he did come home. The tang of the coffee vapors emanating from the Mr. Coffee was all the migraine need to make it first full assault. She sank down, stumbling into the nearest chair. She buried her throbbing, tenderized head in her hands. She didn’t hear the footsteps over the blood roaring through her vessels, the crinkling of plastic and the faint clatter of glass. But she felt the tentative hand patting her shoulder.
Through her bleary vision, she saw the double image of her son, holding the garbage bag in one hand, holding the other behind his back. His face was pinched, and a couple extra years rested upon his visage. He gave her a look that held several years of contrition, and for a moment, she could see her father’s eyes looking out from Leo’s face.
Leo held up the garbage bag. "I didn’t know if we recycle, so I put the bottles in here, but I can take them out if that’s a problem," he said, a faint blush creeping up his neck.
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