By Kara Oakleaf
The day after she shaves what’s left of her hair – for the last time this time – her goldfish begin to evolve.
At first, only the faintest of stubs that will become their feet are visible. Her husband thinks their scales have come loose, but she knows it’s something different and for days, she watches from the couch as they test the way their new bodies move through the water.
*
When she runs her hands over her own bare head, she finds the smallest of knots pushing against the surface. She’s unsure if something new is growing or if she’s just never stopped to notice the shape of herself before now.
When the first green stalks break through her skull, she fingers the velvet softness of new leaves. With each one, she recognizes something she’s never felt before. This one will be an elm. That one, a sugar maple. Near the crown of her head, the beginnings of a sequoia. Every day, she feels new roots snaking their way through her skull and down her spine.
Her husband touches her head carefully, rubs a leaf between his fingers, and stares.
“The doctors say some people’s hair grows back different,” she tells him. In the tank, the fish stretch their growing limbs like they’re waking up from a long sleep.
“But like this?” he asks.
She shrugs. She loves the brilliant greens sprouting along her old hairline, loves that though she’d never much paid attention to trees before, she somehow recognizes each one by the way it nudges her beneath her skin before it even breaks through to open air. An acacia. A spruce. A Joshua tree. Saplings from every corner of the globe. Nowhere in the world do these trees grow alongside one another, except here, in this broken body of hers. She’s nurturing an entire earth from under her skin.
*
When the fish start swimming to the surface of the water and opening their mouths to the air, she transforms the tank into a terrarium. Dirt and rock shores surrounding a pond of water, the fish moving between two worlds. They crawl onto the rocks, sun themselves under the reading lamp she’s angled over them. They’re evolving quickly, doing things they must have never thought possible.
Days later and the aquarium is teeming with life – fish and frogs and salamanders and little scampering things she can’t name. One day, she’s certain she sees a tiny bird in the tank, flying in circles over the other animals. Something in her wants to call to her husband, to tell him to come see, but she can’t find her voice and he seems so far off already. So she sits quietly at the tank, tracing the ridges of the new branches sprouting from her shoulders.
Behind the glass, the whole history of time plays itself out in front of her, and she watches the passage of so many millennia at once. All these years she thought she’d never see.
*
In the end, the trees nearly immobilize her. She moves slower under the canopy of green shadowing her body. The trees are everywhere now, a jungle of leaves down her arms and shrubs growing from her legs. Under the surface, roots cling to her ribs, they twist themselves around her bones like veins. She should feel trapped by the weight of it all, but instead she feels steady, grounded, at home in her body in a way she hasn’t felt in months. She’d expected a diminishing, but everything in her is growing.
When her old goldfish, who are no longer goldfish but a whole ecosystem of wild creatures, outgrow the tank, she crouches down in front of them and removes the lid. The animals scale the walls like they’ve always done this, and she feels the weight of them settle on her as they crawl up her arms, through the trees, into the forest of her body. She imagines how fast it’s all gone, how they’ll soon grow fur, and then slim fingers, and then wrap their thumbs around each of her branches to hold themselves up. She wonders when they’ll find language, and which words they will speak first. She wonders if she will be able hear it.
Kara Oakleaf’s work has appeared in Necessary Fiction, Booth, SmokeLong Quarterly, matchbook, and elsewhere. Her fiction has been selected for Best Small Fictions and the Wigleaf Top 50, and appears in the Bloomsbury anthology Short-Form Creative Writing. She received her M.F.A. at George Mason University, where she now teaches writing and literature, and directs the Fall for the Book literary festival. Find more of her work at karaoakleaf.com.
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