The fish was slip-slidin and dip-dappin through the salty H20. It was a day like any other, which meant that it was good.

Abruptly, amidst the bubbles, the fish saw a yummy, pink worm just dangling there, less than a foot from its lips. The worm did not try to get away. It seemed to beckon the fish, to wait there patiently in order to be eaten.

Of course it was a trap, but the fish had no clue. It wrapped its mouth around the worm.

Instead of the euphoric sensation of succulence sliding down its throat, the fish’s face was brutally impaled by a giant metal hook. It pierced through one of the fish’s cheeks and out one of its gills, just missing one of its eyes.

If that weren’t enough, a string was attached to the hook, and the hook was then yanked violently and vertically from above. The fish soared toward the surface as if it were a cartoon clown shot out of a cannon, its mind singing with violent trauma.

The fish had been completely robbed of what little agency it ever had. In resignation and shock – an odd combo to say the least – the fish broke the surface without realizing that it had done so or that such a feat was even possible. It did vaguely realize that something significant had changed, because it now saw the sun, a raging, drying yellow fire that the fish had already known to some extent but never so clearly.

Then the fish’s side slapped wood. It was now flopping to and fro in a tiny boat. The fish saw many things that it had never seen before and for which it had no analogous reference to compare: blue jeans, empty beer cans, rods, reels, galoshes, cigarette butts. Essentially, as far as the fish could tell, it had been abducted by beings from another planet, nasty horrors with eyeballs on the front of their faces (!) and overlong fins with skinny little tentacles at each end that bent and straightened for no apparent reason.

It was at this point that the fish realized that it could no longer breathe.

One of the aliens wrapped all ten of its tentacles around the fish and proudly held it up in the air. That’s when the fish saw the very most beautiful thing it had ever seen.

It saw the ocean.

The wondrous, lush, blue green expanse that emptied dreamily into the horizon. The ebbing, flowing, lovingly lapping waves bouncing, rising and falling then rising again in unpredictable yet purposeful harmony. It was cyan and azure and vanilla foam and ubiquitous serenity.

Transfixed, enthralled, the fish had milliseconds to go. It thought:

Wow! It’s so beautiful.

Then, just before its lights went out, the fish finally wondered:

What is it?