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if wishes were fishes my wishes would be dead. but wishes aren’t fishes. they’re wishes. thank god for that.

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PROLOGUE: THE ROAD, ACAST

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once upon a time there was a big wide world and a boy named melvin who lived in it. this melvin, he was not an especially intelligent or good-looking boy, and anyone who saw him might say that he hardly existed at all. but whether he existed or not (and this was something no one could really seem to agree on) they would all describe him the same way: somewhere in his early teens, slightly on the chubby side with thin lips and dark skin and acne all down the back of his neck. his most defining feature, however, was his malformed tangle of a left arm which hung uselessly tense at his side, little more than half its counterpart’s length and atrophied from disuse.

truly the boy was not much of a sight to behold.

but despite all of this he did have a story to tell, however dull: melvin was born to a small woman and a small man in a small house in a small town—The Known Place—where he had since grown and matured at a relatively normal pace. the doctors worried over his arm, half-dead since birth, but had not since made any move to amputate the thing. melvin lead a perfectly normal life despite this, went to school and was instructed on all of the necessary curricula and passed all of his tests with grades only slightly below average. he was not especially kind to the people he met, nor was he especially cruel. being such an unremarkable child, he had no trouble making friends with the other local boys, who had names like patrick and kai and keshav and jerome. he had also made enemies, who had names like jerry and tau and maksim.

melvin glided through the first few years of his life with no real hardships to speak of. he had few memories of his early childhood, pleasant or otherwise. it wasn’t an issue, but simply that there were no experiences from back then that he regarded as being especially worth remembering, save one:

it began in the diphthong of june-july, when the heat was wet and angry and melvin’s air conditioner had given out. while he’d retreated to the cold air of the basement some boys—jerry and tau and maksim—stole away with his pet fighter fish, a beautiful little thing with scales red ablaze and eyes in sharpened coils. they took it straight from its tank, abandoned in the muggy bedroom, and wrapped it in a plastic bag from 7-Eleven. the thing had flopped like mercy itself, and tau had to spear it with a thorned stick he’d found in the brush.

melvin discovered the fish a sum of weeks later, slumped against the bag as it dangled in a knot from the lightbulb in his closet, dripping rot onto the carpet. even dead, he felt a strange pride in that fish; its eyes bubbling grey, maggots packed in the spaces between clumped of rotted red scales, yet still elegant in line and form. he had loved the damn thing. he really had.

that night, he slept with the fish cradled against his chest. maybe he even cried—who’s to say?

first thing in the morning he burned the fish, plastic bag and all. it had a smell like no sleep could dream and no truth could tell; that was probably why he got at least four complaints from the neighbors. his parents had taken care of it; he’d dashed off to shower first chance he got, spent forty minutes scrubbing himself clean of the rotten fish oil and maggots.

and if he missed school for the rest of that week—well, no one could really be certain.

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as he grew older, he began to lose interest in pointless endeavors such as pets and friendships, not out of depression or contempt, but out of pure boredom. you see, melvin was not a boy with many hobbies. when he was very young, he took ballet and found it to be pleasant enough, if not for the fact that the spandex of his tights game him rashes all up and down his legs that eventually started bleeding.

after that, his father—the town’s local beekeeper—tried to show him the ropes of tending to the hives and harvesting honey, but after an incident involving a broken cloake board and melvin’s first ever trip to the emergency room his parents had to concede that it was simply not melvin’s path to take over the family business.

some time later, his mother had gotten the idea to teach him some approximation of kendo. a self-proclaimed “bushidō enthusiast”, she was eager for the chance to practice her swordsmanship, even with her partially crippled nine year old son. this resulted in melvin’s second trip to the emergency room. then they enrolled him in art classes, but he got kicked out after only a week because all he ever drew was dead fish.

eventually, his parents just gave up and left him to his first-person shooters and stacks of soft-core pornography. and melvin was okay with that.

and so time drove forward, and melvin continued to live. he lived in a small town in a small house with a small woman and a small man. he went to school and lived there for a few hours and then went home. in the evenings after dinner melvin would lock himself in his room and live there. often he would watch porn for hours at a time. sometimes he’d jack off, sometimes not. if feeling particularly inspired he might rent a movie that would make him think, or practice his mediocre ballet warm ups at the edge of the bed. most of the time, though, he slept. it was how he kept rhythm: good dreaming, bad dreaming, dreaming about being an egg in a grocery store and praying violently not to die.

he never remembered his dreams, but they were his and he would keep them as long as he was living.

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it was late into the afternoon, perhaps an hour before his mother would call him in for dinner, and melvin was going to die. he was not the type of person who spent much time thinking about death, but if there was one thing he knew it was the things that were true. he sat on the stoop of his front porch, contemplating this piece of information for the first time in his life. it was nauseating in its own right, but melvin knew that one day he would accept it for what it was. the nature of truth was that it, like all things, wanted only to be accepted by those who bore witness. it was a request he was in no position to deny.

just below the stoop there was a road, dark flashing with yellow lines and convertibles and dump trucks and motorcycles. there was a road, long and long and long and snapping at all ends. there was a road, and it did not just then appear to him because it had always been there and quite simply it was not in his nature create a road to follow. but there was a road, and someone had already built it a long time ago, before he was born, maybe even before his parents were born. who knew? melvin didn’t.

at what point had melvin begun to watch the road? at what point had he stood up and begun to move forward? (who knew? melvin didn’t.) but it was not yet dark and the sky that hung there mimicked the taught stretch of the road, full and bulging in the center where he himself stood. and from where he stood, he could count the things he was on one hand: happy. tired. dying. alive. alone. these were the truths he knew, and he knew no others. in one eye he bore the mark of a boy who wanted for nothing, and in the other bore the mark of a boy who had nothing to lose. so he stood there, at the edge of the road, with these truths in his stomach and these marks in his eyes.

beyond this, he could only observe: the candy in his pocket was melting. his sneakers were grey, but had probably been white at some point. he had a matchbox and a picture of his dead fish and a sandwich in his backpack. the sun was out but the light was too cold. every house in this neighborhood was red. dinner was in fifteen minutes. the road stood and stood and stood and it did not appear to him.

he walked.