A Fish For A Wish #planetorplastic

A Fish For A Wish

Leo watched as his sister Annie wheeled herself towards the dining table where foods and a poor excuse for a birthday cake is placed - she is eleven this year.

She stopped just in front of the cake and promptly closed her eyes to make a wish - although there is no candle.

"What did you wish now?" He asked after she opened her eyes.

"To see a real fish." She answered truthfully.

"It is always your wish every year. You can see them on TV or in the digital books." He scoffed.

"Do not laugh at me Leo. I wanted to see a real one and be able to touch it, if I will be so lucky. It is not the same watching it." She answered solemnly.

He watched his sister's face playing different emotions. It's true that every year, her wish is the same. Ever since she met their neighbor several years ago, an old man who told her the tales of hauling and eating a real fish, she became fascinated with it. The man claimed that he belongs to the last ones who experienced eating fishes for a meal. He died a few months past at an old age of eighty-five years.

The old man and his sister became fast friends, he will tell her stories - mostly of fishes with different colors or how the underwater looks magical - and she will be his company. Showing her pictures of him when he was younger, eating fish that he and his father caught from the ocean. He was once a fisherman, he said, but claims that he haven't seen or caught a fish for the past fifty years.

So granting his sister's wish is quite impossible, he knows. But her hopeful dream is what pushes him to try to grant it. He often comes with sailors into the sea for several hours hoping to catch even a small fish, but to no avail. All they haul from the ocean are tons and tons of garbage called plastics - bags, straws, cups among others. That everytime he came home from venturing into the ocean empty handed, his heart will break for the deflated look on his sister's face that he will sometimes ask: 'Is there still hope? Or everything there is, is already lost?'