The Girl Who
Remembered Fish(From the book of short
stories, "1st Tales from Shattered Earth")By : Deborah Susan Jones : Editor
The air was an
especially strident purple that day, the lanes of
continual pizza delivery vehicles streaked past in their
pathetic effort to keep up with demand, something that
they failed continually to manage, even though theirs
was the only traffic on the clutterway having bought
outright the right to use exclusively the clutterway by
paying top-credit toll fees. Still, there was nothing
the populace wouldn't give up to maintain access to
pizza home delivery, even the use of their own personal
vehicles.They'd given up working hard, given up
talking, and now they'd given up eating anything, except
pizza.As such, there was tuna pizza, spaghetti
pizza, steak pizza (replica, of course) cream bun pizza,
lettuce pizza, coca-de-cola pizza, and many many morish
varieties besides.They'd also learned to take their medicine in
a recreational way, with senapod pizza, aspirin pizza
and anti-blood pressure pizza.There was even a pizza-pizza to remind people
that once, a long time ago, the world had only one basic
pizza and pineapple was, generally, something you ate
after a meal and not as part of a main meal.Now though, there were even smoked kipper
pizzas.Josie looked out at the blue spires and the
streaming pizza trucks snaking around them, the spiky
spires of the pizza world dwellers.Between pizzas she filled her time with
trawling thru an ancient electronic archive dating from
the pre-mandolin pizza era that her grandmother had left
her on her tablet device. She loved inserting arbitrary
sounds that might once have been words in a language
nobody much recalled anymore into the built-in audio
search engine."Kypper".Did you mean kipperfish? asked the search
engine.What was a fish, she wondered?"Gold fish?"
Read more in the book here!Deborah Susan Jones
