Sophia tried not to stare at the cut on the clerk's finger. It had opened in the warm humid air of WorldWide Aquarium and Pet Supply and fat drops fell, thick and red, on the damp linoleum floor.

"I've no idea what it is," he said, crossing his arms and painting crimson streaks across his t-shirt. "It came in the last shipment of glass cats, but the breeder didn't know anything about it. I was going to flush the thing-haven't got the tank space-but then I thought someone might come in who knew what it was."

He looked at her hopefully. "Maybe you could find a place for it. You have a lot of tank."

Sophia tapped at the smudged aquarium glass. The anonymous fish gazed at her mournfully. It was unbeautiful, mud-colored with flaccid fins triangulating a short, cigar-shaped body. A faint silver pattern, too dull for display or mystery, was scrawled along its flanks. The flat head was crowned with spines or feelers, some so low on the forehead as to give the effect of eyebrows. The eyebrows of a very old man. Or a cat.

"Maybe," she said. The fish looked reproachful. "How much?"

The clerk had already hooked a plastic bag open. He flipped the tank lid up and cornered the fish with a tattered net. It lay heavy in the netting.

"No charge," he said. "You've the best customer I have. You and the Rottweiler breeders." He slipped the whiskered fish into the bag with a practiced flick and twisted the top shut with a rubber bad before handing it to her. She balanced it on her palm; it was soft and heavy, like a damp detached breast.

"There you go," said the clerk. "Poisson trov-ee."

She smiled at his bad French and he smiled back, exposing teeth discolored, perhaps, by constant exposure to damp air and the eternal airborne mulch of animal droppings and fish flakes and mildew. Then he caught sight of his bleeding finger and wrapped it quickly in the corner of his dirty t-shirt. His smile was close-lipped now, embarrassed. Dull red drops seeped through like wine through a napkin.

Roque would've hated her aquariums. Sophia took great satisfaction in that fact. He hated damp things, things that leaked, things that changed, unpredictable things. He should've hated her.

Maybe he did.

One warm night it rained and she danced in the puddles. It was only on the sidewalk in front of her house, glistening in the darkness, but it was the last straw.

After the breakup she watched a lot of TV. One of the girls at the office had one of those Bettas in vase with a plant on top, the sort of thing you find at street fairs, and she watched that a lot too. A dark red fish with fins like banners twitching back and forth between the roots.

It ended badly and it was his fault and her fault and nobody's fault and Sophia had conversations inside her head with a Roque who never was, the one who became a good platonic friend after the split instead of blowing off her phone calls. They had chaste hot chocolate together on warm rainy nights.

What did you see in me? asked the nice Roque, the kind Roque, the Roque-who-never-was looking at her over the lip of his mug.

Stability, Rock, she teased.

Ro-kay, he corrected her, but smiling, not impatient like the real Roque when she mangled his name. She was always bad with names.

She stared at the Betta under the harsh fluorescent office lights and thought she'd get an aquarium. What do you think, Ro-kay?

He shrugged. If you like. It might be fun.

She bought a twenty-gallon tank and the gizmos therein. It was like high school science, chemistry: lay down the gravel. Treat the tap water with a drop of this and a spoonful of that. So many liters of air per minute. These plants will provide cover and a food source. Do not use rocks from your yard. Change the filter one a month. Change ten percent of the water weekly.

And then the fish. Snails and an algae-eater to keep the sides clean, more plants to shelter fry from their hungry, too-loving parents. Arcane advice from pet store clerks and customers: the permutations of fin rot, the cures for white spot. Her ignorance kindled momentary kindliness from the initiated and she fed off it, like a minnow tearing at a cube of thawing bloodworms.

At first Sophia was not ambitious. A twenty-gallon meant twenty inches of fish: five guppies, their sides inscribed with cryptic runes, a petite pearly gourami, a miniature herd of neon tetras. But she found the brilliant blues and reds of her ten tetras disappointing. She wanted more, clouds of them flashing back and forth, handfuls torn from the aurora borealis. She filled a second tank with their silvered bodies. Blue, red. Boy color, girl color.

Soon she had a third tank, a big one: one hundred gallons. She installed it, empty, on the huge squat table she bought for the living room. But she stopped short of filling it. It wasn't enough. She wanted a world, a creation, an entire cosmos of water, gravel, algae and snails. A forest of water plants. An army of miniature black-finned sharks. A harem of bubble-eyed goldfish. A little universe, where she could be her own mad Jehovah.

She emptied the other tanks, keeping her fish in buckets in the interim, and called a glazier to drill holes, insert glass tubes, seal them tight. He was cute, not really her type but attractive in a sunburnt, nose-peeling way. Sophia felt him looking at her appraisingly and she wondered if he'd mind her dancing in the rain. But he never followed through. Maybe instinct made him keep his distance from a woman so obviously venturing into obsession.

When he was done her first two tanks and an extra fifty-gallon were linked together with the hundred-gallon. A second table supported the glass metropolis. She kept a ten-gallon separate for breeding and keeping eyelash-sized fry safe. She enlisted the pet store clerks to her cause; they gave her more advice and discounts on gravel.

It was an aquatic habitrail; a maze of glass and water up taking up the entire center of the living room. Sophia stocked her cupboards with food for brightening color, for fertility, for fighting disease. Trays of bloodworms slept in her refrigerator. She had a chemistry lab's worth of medications and dechlorinators. She had hundreds of fish now. She was a beneficent god and took good care of her charges. No fin rot plagued her kingdom, no fish floated bloated and belly-up from overfeeding.

Roque (Roque-that-never-was, the nice one) teased her, which was only to be expected. Somebody ain't gettin' any, Soph. Everyone teased her about her kingdom. But everyone loved to visit, to stare at the aquatic panorama, a fragment of lost Atlantis sunk deep in racial memory. Like her, they'd sit and watch for hours without realizing, searching for messages, codes in the shifting ranks of fish, a secret for them alone. It was the perfect drug.

One, after a neighbor had been visiting with her little girl, Sophia found a child's bracelet of small plastic hearts at the bottom of the largest tank. Perhaps she had reached in, defying all rules, to catch a fish and the bauble slipped off. But Sophia was inclined to believe the girl dropped it on purpose. It looked like a tribute to some sea-goddess, the pink and green trinket sprawled across the gravel like a diamond necklace in a tide pool.

She understood. She left the bracelet where it was.

Sophia kept another tank separate from the metropolis: it contained brackish water and the gravel sloped up sharply, creating a shoreline with gnarls of driftwood. Here dwelt her mudskipper, a goggle-eyed creature the color of drowned jade. Generally Sophia was faithful to the piscatorial and avoided the amphibious. But once, passing the tanks of frogs and salamanders at WorldWide Aquarium she paused, seeing jeweled eyes staring at her. It was clearly a fish, but it squatted on a stick protruding from the opaque water. Little armlike fins grasped the peeling bark. "Rainbow Mudskipper" announced the label. "A Southern Swamp Dweller."

Sounds like my sister's boyfriend, said Roque-in-her-head, and Sophia chuckled softly as she tapped the glass gently.

At first the mudskipper didn't move. Then slowly, luxurious as a peacock's tail, a ridge rose on the creature's back. It unfurled like a fan, forming a tightly stretched arch, shimmering with gossamer blues, greens, antique pink. He looked like a fantastical, tiny dinosaur. Sophia fell in love.

The brackish water he needed couldn't mix with the fresh, so his tank stayed discreet from the rest, although she installed it on the same central table. Usually he stayed on his driftwood perch or on the damp gravel, occasionally rolling into the water and back. When she tapped his tank he'd display his ridges, always at the same leisurely pace, as if making sure he did it right each time. She didn't know if he was courting her or warning her off his territory. Whatever he meant by it, he enchanted her.

The plastic bag with the mystery fish floated big-bellied in the central aquarium for an hour, matching the tank temperature, before she opened it and let some tank water seep in. She retied the bag and watched it for a while. Curious guppies tapped the underside of the bag, a long silver bubble, but the fish inside did not respond. After a few minutes, Sophia untied the bag and tipped the fish and its cradle of water into the tank, avoiding the feelers that crowned it. She crumpled the wet plastic in her hand and stepped back to watch. She never knew what each fish re-birthed into her cosmos would do. Some fled to the shelter of the underwater forest, some were more aggressive. Sometimes she misjudged the size or the suitability, and they were eaten by the clowns, or ate the smaller guppies.

The mud-colored fish plummeted to the bottom of the tank and buried itself with a quick flurry of its fins. Sophia bent to peer at the mournful eyes that protruded from the gravel. A slow snake of blackness, tinged purple like squid ink, began to coil from the spot. For a second or two she watched, mesmerized. Then she swore and grabbed for a net, toppling the stand of aquatic paraphernalia. The net fell under the table and she knelt for it. Rising, she faced the spectacle of her cosmos blackening, the dark violet cloud spreading, engulfing the algae-eaters clinging to the sides, the gangs of neon tetras, the gouramis, the brave guppy armies, mollies solitary and proud, drowning without mercy the tender fry in their plastic compartments.

She was paralyzed, gripping the net with white fingers. The fish was invisible in the middle of that muck. She should tear it away like a poisonous snake from the arm of a child, crush it against the wall. But she was afraid, afraid to root blind through the tank and rip up the plants, afraid to destroy the ecosystem. She couldn't separate the tanks without spilling water and fish on the carpet. So she watched, helpless in her fear, as the dark coils seeped from tank to tank. Three hundred gallons of blackened Cajun kool-aid. There was a roaring in her ears, and a voice, not Roque, a woman's voice, saying over and over: the seas became as blood. The seas became as blood, and one third of the creatures died that dwell in the sea.

The mudskipper, safe in his tank, stared at the dark ripples at his borders. He swiveled his head to look at her; his ancient jade eyes blinked. Her limbs were heavy and she could not move. The spines along his back quivered but did not rise. He turned away from her and before she could move, before she could sweep him up in the net he leapt.

It was a tremendous leap for a small fish. He leapt into the bruised water and was gone.

Sophia could only stare.

One, two, three days. The second day was Monday and the telephone started to scream at her. Each time it rang her heart pulsed painfully in her chest, and she kept her knees drawn tight under her chin. She huddled in the corner, watching the ruined city. Murky violet shadows streaked along the walls, and strange lights pulsed deep inside the tanks.

The phone stopped. A minute later, it started ringing again. It would never shut up. She started to uncoil herself from her corner. Leave it, Soph, said Roque. His voice was beginning to change. Sophia paused, irresolute, and the phone stopped ringing. She sank back against the wall.

One, two, three days. The third day was Tuesday and someone might have been knocking at the door. She closed her eyes and thought about the clerk at WorldWide Aquarium-she should warn him about mystery fish from private breeders. In her mind's eye he smiled at her with his discolored teeth. He showed her his wounded finger. The edges of the cut had flowered outward; the raw meat inside was sprouting.

One, two, three days. She must've fallen asleep, forehead on her knees, when the soggy thump woke her. She stared at her knees, at the white-worn denim, and sucked in ragged breaths until she was ready to look.

On the carpet fifteen feet away was a wet, glossy thing, the size of a large dog. It flopped about with increasing control and purpose. Then it began to unfold. Two legs, unsteady but stretching, growing stronger. Mottled arms, curiously jointed, that terminated in webbed, questing fingers. Moist, lidless eyes, the color of leaves floating in water a long time. And still it opened before her. Like a telescope. Drink me.

Something glinted at its neck. A bracelet of plastic, pastel hearts grew there, embedded in the flesh that formed around it as the trunk of a tree eats a rusty pole planted at its flank, surrounds it and takes it painfully unto itself.

The big tank was half-full of a muddy soup of water, ink, scales and mangled water plants. Gravel trailed up its sides; it had the hatched look of an empty chrysalis.

She leaned hard against the wall and forced herself to her feet. The creature crouched on the floor in front of her, finding its feet slowly, like a new, birth-wet foal. Slowly it straightened. The lipless mouth, a gash lined with bone, opened and closed soundlessly. Along its back rainbow spines quivered and stood strung tight as harp strings. It reached for her with one webbed hand.

Sophia ran. She ran past the creature, dodging it blindly as it reached for her, grazing her cheek with its webbed fingers. She ricocheted off the doorway as she ran for the hallway. Her legs were weak beneath her; she was weak from crouching and light-headed from lack of food. She staggered down the hallway, half-leaning against the wall to support herself.

Slow, wet footsteps behind her drove her on.

She practically fell into her bedroom, scrabbling for the door and slamming it shut. She turned the flimsy lock and backed away.

The brass bar at the foot of the bed met the small of her back. She tugged at it, trying to move it in front of the door. It was no use; her muscles failed her.

The dragging sound stopped outside the door. There was a long pause before something knocked, very gently. Sophia tried not to breathe, as if by making no sound at all she could pretend she was not there.

"Sophie." It was Roque's voice, the nice Roque, the kind Roque, but it didn't come from inside her head anymore. It came from the other side of the bedroom door. She looked at where it cleared the carpeting. Green reflections swirled from the hallway, licking underneath.

"Sophi-a," called Roque in a sing-song voice, but not teasing. Never that.

Slowly Sophia went to the door. She clicked open the lock, the cheap-metal lock that anyone could break through in an instant. The door didn't set right on its hinges, so when she unlocked it swung casually open, of its own volition.

She didn't look at the thing on the threshold, carefully looking to the left, to the chipped white paint of the doorframe. She smelled dampness, and algae, and the sour tang of fish food.

It wasn't so bad. She dared a glance at its face.

When she looked through her eyelashes, it looked like Roque. When she opened her eyes, the lipless mouth gaped at her, and the lidless eyes rolled wetly in their sockets.

She lowered her lashes again. Roque smiled at her, with pink, green, blue hearts stuck in the side of his neck.

She liked him like that. She took his hand.

Outside, it was raining.

The End

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