Lionfish by:
Linda McMullen
Bonnie existed in a one-bedroom apartment containing an arm-span kitchen, a bath, a futon, and a medium-sized aquarium for a lionfish called Zelda. The pet store alleged that Zelda had descended directly from the Noah-and-his-wife lionfish pair putatively released into the Atlantic wilds by Hurricane Andrew. “You’re doing Mother Nature a favor; there’re just too many of them in the ecosystem,” the pet store woman had said, her lip curling with the satisfaction of her own good deed. “Lovely creatures – very few natural predators – but…” Bonnie had said, “I’ll take her.” And she had brought Zelda home to her $550-a-month cocoon/cell. Now, she sank into her futon’s wheezing mattress, gripping a pre-printed form letter, unable to coax the words into a coherent message. *** Bonnie’s mother had been a patient and experienced aquarist, but the Lord had taken her home far earlier than Bonnie had anticipated. Her father had inducted her into his mechanic shop’s secret order at the age of eleven. Billy and Jim and Tommy, in their grease-tinted coveralls, tolerated her smoking and cussing with them because she could change a tire as fast as any of them, and handed them her tips when she finished an oil change. When her father had hollered that he would never need a girl in his shop, and the limp strands of her graduation tassel on her rearview mirror crusted together, Bonnie chose the restless Billy and his Fender, and followed him west. His band, Cloud Failure, billed itself as an indie-rock-folk mélange. The boys carved out gigs in Milwaukee’s and Madison’s plentiful bars before moving up to small “venues” across the upper Midwest. (And ascending into the ether of free drinks, a ponytail-and-crop-top retinue, and Ziploc bags passed furtively from hand to hand.) In exchange for a permanent backstage pass and a bed, Bonnie managed the band’s outside-the-ledger affairs. She did consider, at that time, researching more remunerative employment, but went cold at the thought of translating her responsibilities into a resumé. She tried, once, to put her duties into words: she (accidentally) ran her scattered thoughts through a satirical corporate language translator online:
∙ moderated the amorphous and fluctuating Venn diagram of collaboration, rivalry, and resentment among five individually aggrieved
