The Goldfish King
Jessica Cook (University of Southern Queensland)
Once upon a time, deep within a lake, where the light is green and the weeds sway, slimy and malicious, there lived a Goldfish King. He was not born a goldfish. He once ruled the land above, and every room in his cold stone castle was filled with shining trinkets from lands he had conquered.
He had been cruel and silent. He saw no need to waste his energy on words when he could rule his people without them. He had no wife, and he had no husband. He had no room in his cold heart to love. He sat upon his cold throne in his cold and glittering throne room, waging war after bloody war. He silently led his soldiers into battle, and silently led them home again; fewer in number, bone-weary, blood-splattered, and weighed down with still more shining trinkets for the King’s silent halls.
He had slaughtered a neighbouring village in yet another silent, frenzied rampage, when he came upon a young, golden-haired boy. He looked down at the boy from his horse, shivering and alone, and he paused to listen to the boy’s anguished cries. The King searched his tiny, wordless heart. He took his gleaming sword and passed it through the boy. The sword was so sharp that the golden-haired boy’s body offered little resistance to its cold, silent passage through his chest, and out again. The King wiped his blade clean on the twitching boy’s shirt and rode on.
That night, he awoke with a jolt to find a crone leaning over him as he lay in his bed. Her foul breath filled his nostrils, and she bared her few blackened and rotting teeth at him in an eerie and mocking grin. The King still said nothing, merely scrambling up his pile of pillows to escape the closeness of her and her leering, stinking, wrinkled gaze. Perhaps, if he had cried out, she might have paused. She might not have raised her hand, revealing a shining golden dagger, and with a speed that belied her shrivelled and stooped body, plunged it into his heart.
She was silent.
He was silent.
Her blade passed precisely through him where his own had entered the body of the golden-haired boy that very day.
The hag broke the night with one raucous cackle of delight, and then she couldn’t stop. She laughed and laughed, and held her soft, hanging belly as the King bled and shrivelled and gasped and shrank, and his skin sagged like hers, and still she laughed ‘til she ached with it. The King shrank still more, and his skin grew scaled and shone like his trinkets and he could no longer draw air. As he writhed and wriggled on his bloody bed, she scooped him up and placed him in a jar of water, wiping eyes which leaked with her mirth. The water was tinged green from the lake and pieces of mouldy reed floated about him. He gulped great mouthfuls of water and felt it pass through his gills, returning to the jar. He screamed silently with his useless goldfish mouth, his black pebbled eyes unblinking.
The crone limped out of the castle and through the shadowed night. She cackled once more as she roughly tipped the jar to one side and emptied the water, the reeds, and the Goldfish King into the lake. He swam to the slimy bottom, silent, cold, and glimmering. Perhaps he is there still.
Jessica Cook is a book, coffee, pink, and tattoo-loving PhD candidate in literature, at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. Her current research focuses on how magic is used to express nuanced diversity in Australian middle fantasy fiction. She lives in joyful chaos in a gum forest with her husband, two children, two dogs, three cats, two pigs, two donkeys, three sheep, and five chickens.
