Weird Fishes

This piece is a response narrative for the Autofiction x Worldbuilding submissions call.  It was inspired by this Autoficitonal seed. For this call, we asked people to write a response to another author’s autofictional submission, based on the original piece and this bit of cryptic world lore.

This, and other Worldbuilding pieces are being published to a Wiki, which will allow contributors to edit, link, and otherwise annotate their work and that of their peers.

Weird Fishes are a phenomenon where emotions transform into tangible sprites, attaching to a physical form of a word. They are elementally coded artefacts that hold energy ready to be released into the world.

Weird Fishes look almost like shredded newspaper strips, or fortune cookie papers, encased in the relative element per emotion (fire, air, water, earth). They appear like a moving highlight around the words. In order to read or engage with the encased words, one must engage with the emotive sprite(s), releasing the trapped energy back into the world to be recycled.

History

These communal cognitive artefacts first appeared during the Common Era, a byproduct of a culture that repressed its emotions, bottling up powerful energy of all kinds. As the people struggled to express themselves, an unhealthy stagnation set in and biological revenge took hold. Those feelings needed to be expressed and processed, there was no pretending they didn’t exist. The emotions took on a new life, jumping from their blocked host into the shared corporeal world. The people bottled, and bottled, until they burst like a commercial mower catching an abandoned newspaper and scattering its shredded pages to the heavens (see below). This potent residue, or emotive sprite attaches to the word(s) that triggered the reaction. People don’t have to write the words themselves, simply encounter or engage with a physical (digital or traditional) form of words while losing control of those volatile emotions.

Legend says the Weird Fishes look the way they do because of the first time the emotions leapt from their hosts, anger and anxious-apathy colliding in a cyclone of feelings. The energy burst occurred as a newspaper was run over by a labor-worker resulting in a charged altercation with their boss. As emotions expelled between them, they attached to the swirling newspaper pieces, catching like confetti on fire, others turning to hail and crashing to the Earth, meanwhile others rained like wet snow or created teeny tornados in the space around them. It seemed like a shared hallucination until other people of the world started experiencing the same phenomena. A scorned lover’s letter turned to scalding steam in their hands a week later, their words encased in both fiery and watery sprites. More such events continued, until the ambiguous name caught on a few months later, and it’s been colloquially adopted ever since.

There is no anticipated end to the Weird Fishes at present. It has become a reality the people live with, and many are learning to express themselves more aptly, as to avoid inconvenient occurrences of the Weird Fishes.

Types of ‘Fishes’

The elemental type is determined by the emotions bursting forth at time of engagement.

• Anger/Disgust presents as fire elements.

• Sadness presents as water elements.

• Anxiety/Fear presents as earth/metal elements.

• Joy/Excitement presents as air elements.

The number of sprites increases with severity of emotion, and multiple elements can encase the words (those elemental sprites can in turn affect, or mix with, one another). There seems to be no amount of time that negates these emotive sprites, though they can become less potent as time goes by if they remain intact. Most often, the release is triggered instantaneously (especially in the cases of writing with ink and parchment).

Important to keep in mind: emotions do not consider themselves positive or negative, so many different facets and perspectives of the emotion could be captured.

Ambiguity

There is a children’s game called Weird Fishes where players are encouraged to act out different sets of emotions and the other players create a story around the emotions displayed. Either dice sporting the different elements are rolled, or the group shouts elements and emotions at the performer-player. Similar to Old World charades, the game is meant to educate the youth about identifying and accepting your emotions to reduce accidents around bottled feelings. The game is also meant to celebrate community communication, and normalizing meeting one’s internal self honestly. One region uses the commands “sink, spark, flow, float” to represent “earth/fear, fire/anger, flow/sadness, float/excitement” respectively.