We prayed Isabel was pregnant when she woke up half the village screaming because she saw the pirarucu in her dreams. That’s the only place anyone ever saw him. The pirarucu swam in the scar of a river cutting through the edge of the village, came up for breath away from our eyes, searching for air gilded with silence. Most of us knew him from paintings and stories. We were satisfied by that, for his image was better fit for the dark corners of the mind. We didn’t like to remember he lived in the same water we drank. The men didn’t talk about it, but they knew; and the children laughed about it, but they still asked us, their little hands grabbing onto our dresses and aprons, their mouths open with hunger for a fear they couldn’t yet understand.
The fish either meant life, or death.
