Congratulations on Catching That Giant Fish!

You’re a toothless old man from South Carolina (pronounced Souf Carlinny) and you love to fish.

But there’s a conflict! There’s a giant fish in the lake where you fish and you haven’t caught it yet.

“That giant fish doesn’t exist,” your son will tell you.

You’ll throw a full bottle of beer at his head. It’ll shatter and leave a terrible stain on the wall and the rug beneath.

“You have erectile dysfunction and a fish won’t change that,” your wife will tell you.

You’ll shoot your gun into the ceiling until she leaves the room in a huff.

“Let’s go fishing,” your old alcoholic buddy who also has erectile dysfunction and will, for some reason, still be in the room at this point will tell you.

You’ll grab your hat and get in the truck and drive down to the local fishing hole, which will be a giant lake flooded with toxins from years past.

Then you’ll get in a tin boat with some poles and spend the next three hours quietly suppressing your mutual homosexual urges. You’ll sit there a good long while, chewing your lip and letting your pole rest in the water. You’ll wait and watch the horizon and wonder what’s past it, what’s outside of Souf Carlinny, if it’s anything at all.

Then your pole will dip.

It’ll dip once, twice, and then a third time, a big time. It’ll dip so violently that you’ll barely be able to catch it as it starts to fly out the boat, your body surging forward, hands gripping the pole as a force than can only be the Biggest of Ones tries to pull it not just from your hands and from the boat but from the world itself – the pressure of the fish upon the pole will threaten the very space time continuum the force of its bite will be so great.

Your friend will grab you around the waist, taking great if momentary care not to touch your junk as he does so. He’ll grunt as he pulls back along with you, as the fish drags the two of you, along with your boat, around the lake.

The fish will move so violently and so vigorously that your boat will zip around the whole lack, back and forth and back and forth until your friend suddenly pitches forward into the water.

At this moment the violent movement of the boat will cease. The water beneath you will go dark.

The fish’s mouth will erupt from the water to swallow your friend whole.

You’ll act without thinking, catapulting out of the boat and on to the fish’s back, hands wedged into its gills. The fish will try to dive, but without the ability to close its gills it’ll feel pretty uncomfortable doing so, so it’ll mostly just skim around the surface of the water, making you wet and making its back feel quite dry.

You’ll yank on whatever fleshy bits you can get your hands into as hard as you can, struggling to guide the fish towards the shore, anywhere that might allow you to save your friend. The fish will be so powerful, so potent and unaware of its own strength that it will rush through the water, blinded by pain, into the shallows and up onto the shore itself. Beached, the fish will flop, flap, flip you off onto the dirt.

You’ll lay there a moment, gathering your wits as the fish tries to work its way towards the water. You’ll see it in all its splendor now: it’ll be the size of a small car, possessed of splendorous, scintillating scales. It’ll be beyond gorgeous, the single most profound thing you’ll have seen in your entire life. Mutated or not, it’ll be an incredible sight.

At this point there will be two options: you can either let the fish go, let the myth go on for future generations and perhaps let your grandson one day have the same experience that you’ll have that day: a moment where he realized that beneath the surface of everything, however banal or hideous, something beautiful and dangerous lives, something beyond our comprehension.

Or you can end it, kill the fish and go home to your shit life. Your friend will almost certainly already be dead, and you hate your wife so you won’t want to have to worry about fucking her again, so there’s no way you’ll be bringing the fish back with you. It’ll just be a moment in time after you leave the fish’s corpse on the shore, waiting for the buzzards.

You’ll walk back to your car and get your gun.

Congratulations on Catching That Giant Fish!