Deep Down Thomas

Thomas, tall, long-limbed, pale, looked upon the brightness of the waterfall and the light which jumped off it like white fish. It had taken him half a days hike to get there, to see this miraculous thick torrent. His hut was four miles of dense forest south. And in the hut his wife slept, naked because of the heat. Thomas, looking at the falls, thought of her, and then thought of how cold the water might be.
The roaring of the water was muted in the slow darkness beneath the surface. It certainly is rather cold, thought Thomas, still holding his breath in a tight knot in his chest. Then he saw something. It was barely a flicker. Orange. He broke the surface into the loud bright day, inhaled and dove back into the purple water, searching. He swam toward where he had seen the flash of orange—or was it yellow, he wondered. The purple turned to grey, the grey turned to black. Between his ears, the chords of his brain tightened as if they would snap. And just when he couldn’t take it, when the chord was so tight that it vibrated like the strings of a violin, he saw it.
A giant gold eye, bulging and as big as a cereal bowl. And around the gold gooey eye, the orange glory of a gargantuan goldfish, resting in thick tongues of black seaweed. Slowly the eye, which had been shut with a golden fleshlike eyelid opened and Thomas saw the shining white of it, and then the blue. An eye bluer than the sky, bluer than the waterfall. The eye looked at Thomas and Thomas looked at the eye, and Thomas could see his small reflection floating in the bright blue iris, the size of an action figure. The sound of the chord strung between his ears had reached the pitch of a woman’s scream. He didn’t have much time.
“Why are you so large, Fish? And why do you sleep so deep?”
“I sleep so deep because I am tired. I am large with the bodies of my kin.”