The Starfire Codes: Sentences Vol. 11 Submission
The Absurdity of the Fish Queen
**For context, first read the above post from Demi at
. Here you will find the writing prompts that will make the following absurdity seem less so. Or so one hopes. Thanks for reading.**The Absurdity of the Fish Queen
Another late Friday evening, sequestered in Biology 101 lab, assigning letter grades to the latest carnage. The gruesome results of the most recent class of scalpel-and-probe wielding freshmen. Rote evalution of the sliced and diced, formalin preserved, placenta-liberated baby shark specimens. Don't forget the placentas. The exquisite external baggage of preborn Squaliformes has likely been featured in an exclusive adrenochrome orgy somewhere in Hollywood. Or at Howard’s wedding reception. Fitting aperitifs for the Ichthyological elite, no doubt.
This semester provided an unusually disinterested lot of careless twerps, brains already in Winter Break mode, the subtleties of proper and careful dissection overpowered both by their revulsion of the task, and potential for post-adolescent shenanigans with sharp instruments.
Grades are due to-day. I should be concentrating on the present, but I'm in December. I'm a time traveler. Traveling back to before...seriously girl? It’s been a year. Get over it Fish Queen. My little Fish Queen, that was Howard’s nickname for me. Charming at the time, I guess, but now 100 percent Nazi monkey suckage.
Apparently, sleeping with the Head of Department doesn’t guarantee career advancement. Who knew. What an asshole. “Oh, no, you invoked the cloaca.” Well, in this case, a single multi-functional sewer orifice is an apt description for him. An alternate anus. A cloacan being, reptilian even.
Such is the existence of this wage-slave T.A., or Teaching Assistant. In my case, a tasty bit of T and A laboring at the beck and call of Howard Palmer, Head of the Marine Biology department, aka thesis advisor and recently married former lover. A condition which coincided NOT with an invitation to the blessed event, but with termination of the grant that funds my position. Once again, I'm the fluffer for the purse-cocks.
All hatred aside, I love Howard dearly, but the fact that he married a *Jewish* woman was a huge step for him lol. I am quite certain he would not have been getting jiggy with THE FISH PEOPLE. If only he would have stayed single. But fish-people are attractive to those who study them, and so I became his forbidden object of desire. His Fish-Queen.
Memories of late-night encounters in the lab, discussing mating habits of the elasmobranchs, watching vaguely titillating documentary footage, sharing a carefully disguised beaker of peppermint schnapps from the specimen cooler or cups of tea brewed atop the bewitching flame of the bunsen burner. Was this love or was getting jiggy with his Fish Queen merely a distraction from the normal for Howard.
"Normal" is overrated. Also, entirely subjective. I have no idea what it actually is. I suspect it's a myth. Obviously I am no expert on normal homo-sapiens, fish-sapiens or otherwise. And this normal that I find myself living in, this process of growth, this continuing education, well honestly, I would have been better served studying wild badger husbandry.
Stomach grumbles. Totally tense. I need a xanax sandwich. A quick look in the daypack reminds me of the lunch, bottle of sedatives and and coffee thermos left on the kitchen counter this morning. The absent-minded result of pining for love lost whilst hastily reheating leftovers. It occurred to me while unperturbedly sautéing peppers and steak in a mound of beef tallow. Dreaming of heavy equipment, visions of KILL-DOZER the SEQUEL flashing through my brain.
Yes, that would be one solution to the problem of matrimony-induced unemployment. Fuck you Howard. Tear it all down. I'm buying this excavator from Temu. I’ll play Judith to your Holofernes, and together we’ll create some garden art for your new love nest.
Hungry, depressed, annoyed and alone. I look to the right at the now schnapps-free specimen cooler. More trays stacked for grading, nothing remotely hopeful within. Let alone the rando body parts in the fridge next to the egg salad. Yesterday’s lunch, present but also uneaten.
Reminded of the task at hand, I select another landscape-in-miniature of excised and withered fish-dangly-bits staked with T-pins and labeled for identification. This particularly artistic little bastard created an impressive Dali-esque recreation of Vlad the Impaler’s botanical gardens, complete with written narrative of the massacre of the “Fish People”.
The figure of Vlad himself was fashioned from bits of the shark’s reproductive system wrapped upright around a probe, topped off with one shrunken and deflated shark eyeball. The eye of Sauron, no doubt. What a dweeb. I will admit however, that the symbolic and visual word play, plus the invocation of LOTR was highly amusing if not historically accurate. Still. "Fish people" makes me wonder if they have fish cloacas, human genitals... por que no los tres?!?! Was there another message here? Some psycho-sexual statement, some cry for help from this pithy but rule breaking student?
Grade? C. : “Proper excision and identification of specimen. Display, while creative, does not follow the rubric outlined in the syllabus. Misuse of biology lab supplies is cause for immediate downgrade. This is not a show-and-tell for your Romanian historiography seminar, dumbass.”
I feel like the only thing that can calm me down right now is half an hour of peacock noises. And that egg salad, next to the body parts, which imparts a slight essence of formalin upon the tongue.
Am I foisting my hatred for Howard, the nauseating grind of my empty stomach walls, my self-loathing at being used by some elitist cloaca of a man, upon this normal kid just trying to get his lab grade? And with that, normalcy disappeared in a puff of logic....
Reconsidering my decision, I hit backspace, amend the snark, and type an A in place of the C for the grade.
I am the Fish-Queen after all, and I deem his offering to be honest and acceptable.
I like it, but what in tarnation is this? 🤯 🤣