Ever since the low tide that lasted three weeks solid, we only seem to catch fish that are already dead but their wounds are all healed over. I've seen plaice with huge chunks out of their sides healed better than any post-op human I've ever seen. They've clearly been attacked at some point early on in their lives but the bigger ones are at least eight years old and over a month deceased.
At first we thought it was some weird lunar thing brought on by global warming or something science-based that we didn't understand. So we pretended it was normal, used it to gain a few tourists until we figured out that it went deeper than just the odd fish. It was every fish and recently the odd bird too!
I found a gull in my back garden just yesterday with both legs and half of its underside just gone, the feather's grown back all crooked and wrong but the damn thing was stone cold dead just like the fish. If I didn't know any better, and I'll be the first to say I'm not the most up-to-date sort, I'd say this was spreading across species.
From one fish to another is one thing, you see, as fish are all basically the same shape and the same size with all their bits and bobs in different colours. Birds are another thing entirely, what with the egg laying and lack of gills or swim bladder so whatever's getting the fish is getting the birds too.
I do wonder if it's some kind of prehistoric thingy that's survived like the tortoises have and is moving further inland to get better food. None of the fishermen have seen anything unusual in the water though and all their reports state that the fish move just fine below the surface but die the second they hit the air.
Now it could be a particularly unique strain of fish-rabies where they're air-phobic and with something necrotising about it that eats the flesh from the inside all neatly and kills them when they dry out. It could be a parasite that does the same thing. Either way the fish are being taken to labs and furnaces alike in the hopes of figuring this out.
I just hope that whatever this is, germ or animal - I don't care at this point - doesn't spread to humans because the thought of waking up with a huge chunk of me gone and air burning every inch of me as I struggle to breathe what has become a poison to me, doesn't sound appealing at all.
At first we thought it was some weird lunar thing brought on by global warming or something science-based that we didn't understand. So we pretended it was normal, used it to gain a few tourists until we figured out that it went deeper than just the odd fish. It was every fish and recently the odd bird too!
I found a gull in my back garden just yesterday with both legs and half of its underside just gone, the feather's grown back all crooked and wrong but the damn thing was stone cold dead just like the fish. If I didn't know any better, and I'll be the first to say I'm not the most up-to-date sort, I'd say this was spreading across species.
From one fish to another is one thing, you see, as fish are all basically the same shape and the same size with all their bits and bobs in different colours. Birds are another thing entirely, what with the egg laying and lack of gills or swim bladder so whatever's getting the fish is getting the birds too.
I do wonder if it's some kind of prehistoric thingy that's survived like the tortoises have and is moving further inland to get better food. None of the fishermen have seen anything unusual in the water though and all their reports state that the fish move just fine below the surface but die the second they hit the air.
Now it could be a particularly unique strain of fish-rabies where they're air-phobic and with something necrotising about it that eats the flesh from the inside all neatly and kills them when they dry out. It could be a parasite that does the same thing. Either way the fish are being taken to labs and furnaces alike in the hopes of figuring this out.
I just hope that whatever this is, germ or animal - I don't care at this point - doesn't spread to humans because the thought of waking up with a huge chunk of me gone and air burning every inch of me as I struggle to breathe what has become a poison to me, doesn't sound appealing at all.
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