Sleeps With the Fishes

I WAS CAUGHT between two worlds: human and piscine. I had been welcomed into the school. I moved with them, as they moved. I observed their feeding habits, their societal structures. I was like a salt-crusted, Ichthyological Jane Goodall, except that my silverbacks weren’t gorillas. They were bonefish. Scores of them. Possibly hundreds. All around me, glimmering tails flapped like the banners of their clan—a clan of which I was now an adopted son.

I gave them names. The elder female was Kiara. Bright silver and roughly three pounds, she was protective and motherly. The big male I called Lars. He was also bright silver, and also three pounds, and I could tell that he did not trust me, and probably never would. Three precocious