Chapter 4: Chapter 3: Steamfish (Pt. 1)

Chapter 3: Steam Fish

 

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Logan flailed wildly. He could hardly see anything, his vision filled as it was with murky grey and beige. He choked on hot water. It invaded his mouth and throat, filling his lungs. He snorted it, feeling its sting in his nostrils and sinuses.

 

His knee smacked into something hard, and he yelped, which only resulted in him swallowing even more water. Reaching out with a hand, he searched desperately for whatever he’d banged his knee on, and upon finding something hard and flat, pushed off of it.

 

His head broke the surface and he sputtered triumphantly. He gained his footing and stood, finding that the water rose only to about waist height.

 

A voice laughed at him inside his head.

 

"You almost drowned! In, in-"

 

The laughing returned with newfound vigor. He had an image of a boy, doubled over, crying with laughter. He felt ashamed by the cackling.

 

"You survived travelling through a rip in space and almost died," the voice paused, struggling to restrain more laughter, "drowning in water that doesn’t even reach your chest."

 

The voice, losing control once again, continued to chortle.

 

“Mikey?” Logan asked.

 

“Mikey!”

 

"Yup! That’s me!"

 

The celestial had regained a modicum of composure. Somehow, Logan was not surprised that Mikey's first reaction was to laugh at him.

 

Still dripping and gasping for air, he said,

 

“a rip in space? And don’t laugh; I almost died, again. Wouldn’t that have just made more work for you?”

 

He coughed out more water and blew his nose vigorously.

 

"That’s exactly why I’m laughing! And yeah! A space portal, or something. I don’t really know. We’re definitely not on Earth though."

 

The voice resonated inside his skull, similar to the sensation of his own internal monologue, but distinctly different at the same time: foreign.

 

Mikey is in my head, he thought. He wondered if Mikey could hear his thoughts, too.

 

“Mikey,” he tried, thinking to himself.

 

He tried focusing on the thought, making it loud, projecting it outwards.

 

"Yes! That’s me! Good job, looks like we can talk like this, too. That’ll be useful for sure!" the excited celestial said, his voice ringing inside his head.

 

“Could you hear what I thought before I… thought that?”

 

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"Hmmm, no. I don’t think so anyways. I’ve never shared a body before, but it feels like I’m riding passenger and you’re driving. We can talk, but I can tell that we still have distinct identities."

 

Logan could sense the honesty of what Mikey was saying, like he knew, somehow, with unmistakable certainty that what he said was true. He could sense his presence there inside of him, now that he paid closer attention to it. It felt intimate, like a familial bond of trust and inherent understanding, but deeper, more profound.

 

“We’re not on Earth?” he asked, aiming the thought at Mikey’s presence, both inside him and next to him.

 

It was an odd sensation, but it was quickly becoming familiar.

 

How long has Mikey been inside me? I think I was unconscious for a while, but I can’t tell for how long.

 

The thought made him cringe uncomfortably.

 

Mikey felt Logan’s soul shudder and squirm fleetingly.

 

"What is it?" he asked.

 

“Oh nothing” Logan responded, too quickly.

 

He suddenly had an image of Mikey in his original adolescent form, narrowing his eyes and examining him quizzically.

 

“You mentioned we’re not on Earth?”

 

The image of Mikey's face passed, and Logan looked around for the first time.

 

He was standing in a steaming pool of water ensconced in a stone basin. He stood towards the edge and could see the stone shore not too far away. Looking towards the middle of the pool, he saw that it expanded outwards into the mist.

 

He couldn’t make out any of the other edges from where he stood; the water continued on until it disappeared in grey steam that rose from its surface and lingered in the air, clouding his vision. It was a natural hot spring, he realized.

 

Certainly, there were none of these near his home, but that didn’t exclude them from being on Earth.

 

"Not Earth! GET DOWN!"

 

Logan immediately dropped to his knees, nearly submerging himself once again.

 

He’d reacted before even processing what Mikey had said, as if his body was reacting to Mikey's intentions themselves.

 

Half a second later, a massive fish, its scales the same ash grey as the rock forming the hot spring, flew through the air above him where his head had been a moment before, its impossibly wide jaws agape, rows of thin razor teeth, each easily six inches long, packed tightly together in the creature’s mouth.

 

They glistened cruelly in the sun’s light as the fish landed back in the water to his right with a splash like a person doing a belly flop. It was easily eight feet long, and thick.

 

The fish looked like a kindergartner’s drawing of an oversized bluefin tuna that had combined with Edward Scissorhands, come to life, and developed an appetite for human flesh.

 

“What the hell is that thing!” he yelled, this time out loud, as he got to his feet and sprinted through the water to the pool’s edge.

 

The water that’d once already almost been his demise now threatened to do him in for good as it weighed heavily at his pants, slowing his escape to what felt like a crawl.

 

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