I.
On the court their hearts were thick like royal capes, their fanfare earned because to them it was frivolous. The district’s tennis teams were fixated on victory. If they won, they could be themselves, enjoy their daily words and gestures.
However, once a year, their coaches forced them to attend a riverside barbecue, where any discussion or playing of tennis was banned.
The rocky riverbed paralleled a sparse, windy forest, and on a newly-chilly October morning, the boys shuffled under the balloon gate, tense, unable to smile, especially those who had seen on the internet that barbeques were bad for tennis. But obeying their coaches’ orders, one by one they stumbled in, startled and confused by the welcoming confetti, and took their seats for the all-day event.
Their tiny chairs were lined up facing the river, each one equipped with a private, tiny grill, raw meats and abundant sauces piled before it. With staggered, awkward start times, they nervously grilled their meats, pretending to be so focused on doing it properly that they had no choice but to seem unhappy.
However, when they started swallowing the honey and garlic-soaked flesh, the heavy fats and pungent spices saturated their organs and then their skin. After hours of unctuous succulence, the flood levels rose to their greasy foreheads, and they started to laugh, and conjoined their grills, naturally joining tiny roasting bands, even though their assigned seats strategically had broken the teams apart.
They play-bullied each other, saying things like, “Hey you! Hurry up and roast the meat! Haha!,” play-criticizing some of the boys’ roasting styles, laughing and poking their lips and cheeks with their tongs. “Hey, stupid idiot! You suck at roasting meat! Flip it!”
One smaller boy resourcefully limboed meat on his forehead, a big hit drawing a large crowd to see his antics. Even members of other teams rhythmically cheered and patted him on the back. They discussed cooperation, and how they would make money when they had grown up.
But amidst these festivities, one boy was violently lurching, his face lolling limply and his elongated neck ballooning, some mass extending straight upward, moving up to near bursting.
Many of the boys gathered to witness this curious display.
The surface of his eyeballs was popping out like an ice cream push-pop. His mouth got torn open wider, and his neck and spine were forced upward and then snappingly thrust down, and in that same thrust appeared at last the enormous egg, juicily veined by his dark-green bile. He spat it out onto the rocky ground, exhausted, before vomiting more splashes of bile. The other boys shuffled to avoid all of the fluids.
Too heavy to carry, the egg stayed there, nurtured by the meat the boys jokingly threw at it.
A thousand years later, aboard deck 34 of a Newtype Spheredrifter, the egg-cougher’s green lounge coat fit too tightly, suggesting the outline of his nipples, and was warmer than would be comfortable, but he didn’t want to take it off to reveal his blue-dotted linen shirt, which was humiliatingly unthreaded, a loose filament innocently flapping on his shoulder. Ever since that barbeque, his neck and face bobbed loose, and his eyeballs frequently popped out, but people still smiled at him, so despite his anxieties, he didn’t dwell on it.
From behind the pale blue bar, a beautifully thick-eyebrowed man with a surreal, designer hairstyle served him a crackleribbed oak spirit, which he now was sipping nervously. The sales meetings had gone well, and he was pleasantly discussing the charter plans, even adlibbing sincere praise of the view from the spacedeck. His assigned charter-broker personably agreed with a friendly smile.
Through the window he gazed at Jupiter, enormous sender of nocturnal thunder, and then at the freckle-veined hailstone suspended refreshingly in his bubbly.
Later, relaxing alone in his room, rented for him on the Spheredrifter just for this occasion, the boy thoughtlessly flipped through presentation notes and offers piled messily on his desk. He had even used a pen to mark notes and write numbers; he enjoyed making marks with a smooth writing utensil. Drunk and passive, he fell into a troubled sleep.
With godlike insight and all of his muscles burning, he swung his racket, obeying a higher rhythm, floating alone amidst formless darkness. One by one his teammates appeared beside him, and finally released from their attachment to balls and courts, they together faced the darkness, smiling, sweating, singing their team song, each swing propelling them higher as they flew through the blackness without beginning or end.
Behind them tubular, biological architecture flourished, a vision of a future in which humans harnessed life, growing hundreds of meters per second, now kilometers, into lights and cities, and with each heartfelt swing, their holograms flew through yet another new corridor.
Unforeseen rebirths and reincarnations of new and old prophets looked on smug, their ghostly lips miming a holographic truth, all wordlessly chanting their own team songs.
And the titan fish, larger than any sphere or cluster, its mad tumor scales multiplying inward crustily, heaved a deep, clashing horn, emerging diagonally upon this scene, shattering the tubular cities peacefully, steadily. It opened its mouth and emitted ripples, shaking the boys’ visions from the distance of galaxies.
And still they sung, smiles and tears; swinging cannot cease ‘til they reach that fish.
And he would wake up with an anxious headache, his limbs feeling heavy as if floating, listening to simulated ventilation. Had he left some lie behind the day before, some mistake he’d forgotten to hide? He would calm himself, make some tea, take some notes; he had a busy day ahead, and the thousand-decked egg vessel dipped into ever-lower spaces.
II.
On the breakfast table, beside the boiled spinach, bonito sprinkled, the medicinally pickled hot pepper leaves, the fluffy white rice of the new year’s crop, the fermented soybeans okra-like, viscous, lay the pollock roe in a satchel of butter, pouch stuffed with the egg mass ripped from the pollock, now wrapped in foil, baked and delicious, manifesting lovingly on ten million tables.