Light and Goldfish

The temperature of that day, the air, the sounds, and that slightly blinding light. The world was coated in a layer of gold.

Back then, I was only as tall as an adult’s waist, holding my mother’s hand on the crowded street outside a shopping mall. I walked slowly. A smell I couldn’t quite name seemed to waver in the air.

People stood in the sunlight, their faces made irritable and indifferent by the damp heat. Wet hands seemed to reach out to catch and wrap around every passerby hurrying forward, forcing them to suppress a faint irritation and their eagerness to get inside the mall, and to keep walking slowly.

On the other side of the road, several fish tanks were stacked together. Faintly, I heard the sound of a stream. It slipped through the invisible roar, through people’s conversations and footsteps, and brushed lightly past my ear. Without realizing it, I let go of my mother’s hand and threaded my way between hips and legs of different colors and sizes, hurrying toward the fish tanks on my own.

Glass, water, and air shared the same color. Sunlight entered the water and was kneaded into fragments. The shattered light clung to the drifting bodies, turning into orange-red leaves of flame. At the end of one body trailed something translucent, like a piece of gauze accidentally left in the water, or a sheet of plastic film in the final second before fire melted it. That thing gently unfolded and swayed slowly in the water, so slowly that it seemed to me not to be swimming, but simply drifting.

“This is a goldfish.”

Her voice was soft.

Goldfish. It wasn’t a word I had never heard before, but I had never connected it with these things in front of me. I stared at those slowly swaying bodies and repeated the word once more in my head.

Goldfish.

But it sounded too small. They were still swaying in the water, the light on their bodies brightening and dimming, while that translucent thing behind them slowly spread open and slowly folded back together.