07.16.08
The Evangel of Koi
Two red-orange and black koi swam in the small, clear pool. Clover burst from the water line, up the artifically naturalistic banks like a miniature rain forest.
The boys dreamed. Their dreams opened in the warm light of the Spring afternoon. The sun warmed the doors of their eyes, and the future was born.
How long would the two koi live?
Were there any other koi quite like them? … anywhere?
Mehrzad reclined amidst the pumpkin and the watermelon, the sunlight soaking into his face, his hands, and his clothes. His spirit looked down into a pool stirring with currents of koi.
He sat up, and turned to his left. “Do you think we could make more koi? … from these?”
“Maybe.” Peter the fisherman laid back behind his eyelids and reiterated, “maybe we could.”
A fish is bound to die sooner or later, but if it has offspring, maybe it lives on through them. Maybe they wouldn’t look exactly the same, but even a single fish can change its colors. Lizards even shed their skin. Parenthood can be like that: like an old, tattered phoenix, rising young and perfect from the ashes of its mortality.
There was a mission at hand for anyone who would seek to deliver the gift of immortality. In that sunny moment, the boys chose to accept it.
At recess, they leaned against one of the elm trees lining the schoolyard, talking shop. How to find out how to breed koi? How to find a koi breeder? Check the phone books at the library. Pet stores. Suppliers. Gardeners.
They soon determined that reproduction wouldn’t be enough. The population would be too much at risk in the boys’ little garden pools, so they hatched a distribution scheme: they would market their hatchlings, and spend the proceeds of their commerce on more fish farming. The spawn would survive beyond the efforts of the boys themselves.
They wouldn’t stop at the sale. They would evangelize the aesthetic, psychological, and spiritual benefits of koi stewardship throughout the Sink, until the line of their two koi would finally sustain itself.
The shade of the old walnut tree crept across the boys’ faces, as the sun drifted into the West. How much time had passed they could only calculate; it could not be perceived.
They rose to their feet and made their ways home, a single future in their eyes as their feet followed their diverging paths into the present.
©2008 Dan J. Jensen
