I am calm at first, ambling about my home eating snacks. “A gobi shiner would be nice; I’ve heard they are a Beaver Island delicacy.” “I wonder when that cicada hatch will happen in Gadsden?” I settle for the back swimmers and cray stations on the mud flats behind the mall. Suddenly my carp spouse decides she will not spill her eggs again this year. When she told me this it ruined my spawn season. I jumped frantically about, often leaving the home for airy liberation. I know I am a solid jumper. My job is ordinarily cruising, sunbathing, and occasionally when I am really happy— sticking my nose in the dirt and standing on my head. That kind of euphoria is rare nowadays. I wanted to make my living as a jumper. My fat carp lips hoover up some scum in my path. “Ah, shit. Something just cut my lip on the inside. What was in that clam, tasted like hackle and chenille?” I turned hard the other direction, just then I felt the weight of an angler pulling my new monofilament chain.
Fly fishing was better than when the hunters convert their Jon boats into hypnotic light machines that freeze me in my tracks, then shoot projectiles at me. I was grazed by an arrow one time. It hurt like a mother, but generally speaking I didn’t fall for the tricks of anglers. Their near nuff crayfish patterns were never that suggestive of food, unless you get in a hurry. I have found usually if you just meander and nibble long enough to see if there is a hook then you can spit it before the dummy on the bow sees the strip set as being an appropriate reaction for them to make. They seem to always be late in coming on the cowbell pressure. I can blow out a non-food item quicker than most of my cousins. Very rarely do you get too much cowbell from a greenhorn angler.
Now this angler I was connected to had been in this situation before. Every time I swam one direction, he would steer me the opposite way. He was whooping me after my first blazing hot run. I took him into orange backing, but I was struck by a crippling fatigue in my fins. His drag was tightening down. I wanted to jump like my tarpon cousins down south. I had heard gar talk of this aerial strategy to unbutton hooks, but it was not spawn. I couldn’t do it.
As passionate as I am about jumping, some force compelled me to stay down in the dirt. We can’t go against our nature. It’s as unnatural as my Asian big head cousins in the Mississippi River. “I hate those guys,” I thought, still incapable of jumping. I am not prejudiced; I just find them a little showy with their fine acrobatic leaps through the air and above the ceiling of their homes, and their aggressive showy smacks of boaters’ faces. Those bastards think they are too good for their home. But I digress as my lips pull hard toward this angler’s boat.
The angler grabs me by my slimy tail which I am very proud to say slips out of his hands every time the jerk tries to lift me for a selfie. When I flopped I imagined myself leaping through the air back into the water, but the hook was still in my lip, and the taut line snapped as my fat belly banged against the gunwale. I defecated all over the man’s bow like a lady fish would do if she was in the same situation. It was humiliating. The angler had a Drake Magazine shirt on, and after I squirted embarrassing fluids all over his bow and his iPhone he kicked the rest of my defeated body back into my fairly toxic home. The Coosa was named the fifth most polluted waterway in the country this week because of chicken plant discharges, but Hell, home is where the heart is. “I am a decorated Coosa River carp now; I have battled to survive before, and I will do it again.” I swam to some deeper flats away from the skiff. The jewelry hung from my nose and whiskers like a hybrid fly bull ring.
The angler was defeated too because he did not get that most precious commodity: photographic proof of the encounter. He motored off in disgust at his contemptible luck, and the carp that escaped an instagram post, haunting his future dreams as one hell of a jumper (for a carp) is me.
.