Free Forever Never Ends by Scott Nicholson Page A

sport.
    Junior reeled it in and flipped it onto the bank. It was the ugliest fish he had ever seen. If it even was a fish.
    The thing was shaped like a bowling pin, with a blunt face and heavy tail. It had fins that were like fingers, three in a row down each side. Its single gill was a continuous gray slit across its forehead and gooey mucus dribbled out as the gill flapped in search of water. Its eyes were like wine grapes, green and round and bulging and without pupils. And its mouth—
    The fucker's got TEETH. Not little bumps of cartilage like hogsuckers and knottyheads have. This thing's got a mouthful of bone briars, and no way in hell am I gonna stick my hand in there and work the hook loose.
    The fish-thing stopped wriggling as dirt and twigs collected in the gill. Junior put his boot on its belly so it wouldn't flop away while he figured out what to do with it.
    Now, I may be fucked up. And after two joints of Tijuana Taxi, that's more than a maybe. But there's no way I'm as fucked up as this here fish-thing.
    So, Junior, you can take this thing home and show the old man and see if he's ever seen anything like it, since he's caught and killed just about everything that bleeds in these Appalachian Mountains, except maybe humans. But that would mean having to explain why you were fishing instead of attending the tenth grade, which would lead to an ass-busting or at least a good bitching-out.
    Or you can boot this deformed hunk of fishfuck the hell back into the creek and pretend you never saw it.
    Junior pulled out his pocketknife and started to cut the line. The fish-thing writhed under his foot, spinning free and snapping at his leg.
    "Goddamn it," Junior yelled, hopping back. The thing's eyes were glowing, green and bright as the neon on the pool hall’s pinball machines. Junior whipped the pole, carrying the thing into the air and then back onto the earth. He whipped again and sent the thing's head cracking against a rock with the sound a dropped watermelon makes.
    He lashed again and again, sweating and panicky, until the thing was a green-red hunk of shredded meat. Then he put his boot on the raw corpse and jerked the pole with all his strength, and the line finally broke.
    "Son of a bitch,” he gasped, catching his breath. He kicked the thing into the water and watched as it turned once, slowly, then spiraled toward the creek bottom like a soggy log. He looked down at the twin rips in his denim cuffs.
    He looked back at the thing and wished he hadn't. The tenderized fillet of dead meat had flipped its mutilated finger-fins and twitched its broken clubby tail and headed upstream.
    Junior's buzz left him, jumping from his skin like a ghost from a guillotine victim.

***
    Chester stepped off the porch and Boomer reluctantly followed. Even the hound dog sensed something was wrong. Boomer lowered his head and growled at the underbrush that was thick along the fence line. Boomer never riled himself enough to waste a good growl on shadows.
    Something about the trees ain't right, Chester thought. I know I been in the white lightning just a mite early today, but that only makes a body see double or else see things that ain't there. And this IS there, whatever it is.
    Chester looked at the forest that bordered his weedy cornfield. The trees swelled with buds and new leaves. The dandelions were popping their yellow heads out of the pasture. Usually at this time of year, Chester could practically feel the trees stretching up to the sky, fighting for sunshine and begging for leaves.
    But these trees above the house looked kind of sick. Not quite withered, but droopy, like they were sad about something.
    Trees ought to be happy in spring. Their sap-blood was frozen up all winter, when all they could do was shiver in the north wind while their bones snapped off. But now the thaw had come and you'd think the wooden-hearted things would be jumping for joy.
    And that green glow was back, only it was real faint, so that only a