She lay undulant in her dark Arkansas barn, in the cool and highly oxygenated water of her round and almost musically bubbling tank, her dorsal and tail fins trembling slightly, waving gently. Her whiskers stuck out about a foot in front of her massive maw. A long time ago when she was a virtual baby she had lived in a river and there were different things to eat that washed in from rainwater, things like grubs and red worms and night crawlers and lightning bugs and praying mantises and fire ants and army ants and carpenter ants and ground puppies or newts and stink bugs and skinks and aphids and caterpillars and weevils and carpet beetles and those little bitty bright green tree frogs you see sometimes, the ones with suction pads on their toes. Climb right up a window. Sit there watching you eat supper with big round eyes. Holler like hell in the summertime. Mbeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Now all she got was floating chunks of fish feed, and all it was was dog food anyway, except that it was made in smaller pellets, like BBs, and they put it in a different bag, one with a picture of a catfish on it, but not a catfish as big as she was since she was bigger than the bag.
She was not a behemoth. She was a beauty. She was the nightmare fish of small boys and she came from the depths of sweaty dreams to suck them and their feeble cane poles from the bank or the boat dock to a soggy grave.
There was nothing for her to do but swim endlessly, be a fish factory. A maw-jawed mamaw. Endlessly turning in her tank like a soul sentenced to purgatory forever. She’d stopped bumping the walls long since.
The last time Tommy had put her on the table she’d about flopped her big ass off it onto the bloody and slick concrete floor, it being bloody and slick from him dressing a mess of small ones for a fish fry later that night, back when things had been going really good, for him anyway, not for her, since she was still just swimming around in the same place she’d been in for so long, the mother lode of his fish factory, but now she was almost too big for him to handle by himself. She could still turn around in the tank. Barely. She was a fish factory that kept working, eating and swimming, laying her eggs, having those eggs collected, laying some more, having them collected, over and over, all done in a dimly lit barn that smelled of straw and horses except where she lay in the cool black water, where machines with dim red lights hissed and kept her alive, and eating and laying her eggs, and once in a while a handful of feed sprinkled across the top of her dark tank like midnight raindrops.
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