brain fart: the freakshow
"This place is amazing!" "I'm not sure that's the word I'd use for it… fake as hell maybe-" "Don't be such a stick in the mud June, it's super cool and you know it." "It smells." "That's what they call ambience." "It's what I can unsanitary." "Oooh! Look! There's skulls in here! People skulls!" "I'm surprised you can see anything, the water's green. Uuugh. Is there actually something alive in there? A fish or somethin'?" "There is! Oh cool!"
The words filtered through the grimy water, it's occupant stirring only a little, gills pumped sluggishly, struggling to exact what little oxygen remained in the stagnant tank. He'd begun to think they'd forgotten about him, when was the last time Oscar had changed the water? He couldn't remember. Once upon a time the boy would have sat by the tank for hours at a time and just talked… not about anything in particular, the topics where varied and meandering but the tank's occupant had always enjoyed it. Oscar hadn't sat with him in a long time. Loud tapping on the glass of the cramped space made him flinch, the sound amplified in the water to the point of being painful.
"We seriously just paid ten bucks to see a fish!? I was expecting… I dunno- a chick in a shell bikini and a rubber tail or something…" "Eww. It looks half dead. Look, it must have fin rot or something, poor thing."
Tail curled tightly around himself he finally shifted enough to peer out at the girls circling his tank with dark, clouded eyes. He was so hungry. So, so, incredibly hungry. Fingers, long and slender to the point of almost being skeletal clutched at one the bones beneath him tightly enough that it crumbled, rotten just like everything else in there including, he supposed, himself. Again the tapping. The tapping and the pain of an empty stomach. Thin, sickly and cracked lips drew back from sharp teeth and he lunged. The lunge was clumsy, he couldn't even uncoil to anything close to his full length and his head slammed painfully into the glass. Fingers clawed at the algae covered surface uselessly and he snarled, teeth snapping ineffectively at the water. Oh what he wouldn't give to sink them into warm, plump flesh... The girls screamed. They cursed and screamed and ran and then they were gone and the siren, still hungry and with a small stream of fresh blood oozing from his forehead sank back into his corner. Perhaps he would get lucky and die in his sleep. He could only hope.








