J. A. Tyler is the author of the novellas SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE (ghost road press, 2009) and IN LOVE WITH A GHOST (willows wept press, 2010) as well as the chapbooks THE ZOO, A GOING: THE TROPIC HOUSE (sunnyoutside, 2009), EVERYONE IN THIS IS EITHER DYING OR WILL DIE OR IS THINKING OF DEATH (achilles, 2008), and THE GIRL IN THE BLACK SWEATER (trainwreck press, 2008) . He is also founding editor of mud luscious / ml press. Visit: www.aboutjatyler.com.

Fish in rivers do not feel the heat. Or if they feel the heat they swim down until the middle grows cold and all is well again. Or they punch their fins and dive to the bottom and mud-wrestle into a watered floor. As fish do.

Fish are exempt from destruction. Or they see it as the very last, the final and only animals to slowly succumb rather than bursting skin as the others will. Or they haven’t the capacity to imagine it so that when it comes it is not a shock but just another thing that happened. Like that.

And fish are the barometer of how it is all going. Or they just seem so calm to us when we sit in this grass, in this sun, our hat dipped low on our brow. Or this is just how it seems when we watch them play about the inside of water, the cool there, darting as if always their lives depended on it. How fish are.