Over The Edge #Planetorplastic

Just an Ugly Fish

I had always existed an ugly fish.

My cousins were afraid of me. They would swim away in their bright oranges, translucent blues and shimmering scales, bending the light to make prisms in the waves. I was use to this. 

Through the years though the bright colorful place that I knew started to look a little more like me. Thin whisps of skin that looked like mine moved in the water like tiny ghosts. The other fish swam away in great panic. Soon there more came. And not all of it thin and whispy, but now  stiff, like crab shells. Crabs would crawl in them too. The fish would get caught in it. Slowly they started to look a little more like me. Their colors rubbed off scaring their colors. Some of the young ones would get caught and grow into the ugly stuff. Their bodies growing around it like they wanted to look like me. Soon there was so much of the ugly no one swam away from me anymore. They all held a piece, of it. Some of them started to eat it, other bits would get stuck in their gills and they breathe it.

  The strange fish that had its tail spit right down the middle almost to their head with fins so long that the reached every crevice, would come down, descending from above blowing air from their noses. The other fish would swim away from them at first a little scared. But after a while we would venture closer and closer getting use to the strange awkward fish (they were not all that good at swimming). They would only visit for small bit of time before ascending back to where they came from taking their bubbles with them.  

The stange fish from above started visting more. This is when I started to dislike the special fish. They would come down and try to clean away the ugly. They came with sharp teeth in their long fins and cut it away from the ones who started to look so much like me that they no logner swam away. Little did this fish know that it wasn't doing enough. More an more of the ugly would come in. No one really knew where it came from, and even when I tried to follow it back to the source I just ended up at the top of the water.

That was my mistake. At the top of the water the strange fish scooped me out and finally I could see. That this strange fish wasn't cleaning my colorful home it was actually the one dumping the ugly in. The strange fish pulled me from the net, my gills burning with the need for water. 

"Sorry little guy. Try not to get caught in all this stuff, we know we made our mistakes."

The nonsense. I drop back into my home, the ugly around me brushing on my skin, slightly hurting. But that's fine. I am already an ugly fish.