Free 33 Snowfish by Adam Rapp Page A

Curl’s face with some snow, but I couldn’t get it all the way, so every time you look at her now, the first thing you see is that froggy heartbeat and the second thing you see is that picture of the fish with the X for a eye.
    Curl told me that if I find a bird I should kill it and take all the feathers off and put them over her heart. She says there’s medicine in bird feathers and that it’s the only way to make her lung frost go away.
    When I went bird hunting yesterday I saw this little farm that had this wack-looking chicken hopping in the dirt. It looked more like a rat with feathers than a chicken.
    That farm was in the middle of
nowhere
and shit. The only thing around it was this big old black forest that looked like all the trees was burnt. It didn’t look like nobody lived there but a ghost or maybe one of them Big Foot freaks you see in comic book pictures and shit.
    Tomorrow I’m going to roll by there and steal that chicken for Curl. I know a chicken ain’t no real bird cuz of how chickens don’t fly, but it’s close enough, and it don’t seem like Curl’s got time to be choosy, cuz along with them yellow smears under her eyes her piss is turning brown.
    Back in Rockdale this old skanky sucker who hung out by the water tower called Joe Greenway got brown piss and he died like four days later.
    Last night Boobie stayed up with Curl all night trying to get her to eat some soup, but she just kept spitting it up. That lung frost poison ain’t letting nothing stay in her body. The baby sure liked the soup, though.
    When you look through the windows some of the dead trees look like giant monster claws scratching at the sky. Others look like old, crooked dinosaur bones that got cooked by a fire.
    Curl says that if you walk too close to them trees they’ll kidnap you. She says that even though they don’t got no eyes you can feel them looking.
    She says one night she woke up and saw them dead trees running around. She says they only run around like that when they think you’re sleeping.
    It’s like that big black turkey and them running trees is the only shit Curl cares about now.
    She said she saw a movie once where a tree ran down a hill and killed this man cuz he tried to chop it down with a axe. She said it ran right down that hill like it had some kicks on.
    At night the sky glows purple like the light from a TV when a VCR movie is done playing. And the stars get so big they look like knives coming at you. Some of them stars look like spaceships, too. Especially them blue ones.
    It would be cool if one of them blue stars came and a spaceman lit up his insides and showed us his moon bones. We’d let him stay with us for a few days. We’d give him some of Boobie’s Basics and let him mess with the baby so he could study him and learn about Earth. Curl says the best way to learn about humans is by studying babies cuz they ain’t been fucked or starved yet.
    Them spacemen probably got some pretty cool stuff on their spaceship, too — like them video games you play with helmets and rocks that tell the future and computers and robots that can sing Pepsi-Cola commercials and shit.
    And if things go pretty smooth that spaceman might even invite us to go back with him, and he’d give us astronaut suits and put the baby in a little gravity crib with galaxy blankets and we’d leave the TV behind and skate with the aliens and the fire from the launch pad would make a big launch burn on the van and then —
blow!
— our spaceship would blast off and like four seconds later the pigs would pull up in their Impalas and their Caprice Classics, like skeighty-eight of them suckers, and they’d jump out and slam the doors and watch our spaceship disappear through the purple sky like a little golden chicken egg.
    That would be pretty crisp.
    All Earth’s got is a bunch of Joliet suckers and Rockdale suckers and pit bulls and shit, anyways. And the Joliet suckers poison the Rockdale suckers cuz they don’t