Leo had not prepared himself for the rain, although the forecast had not predicted just how much water would be coming down. He had failed to bring an umbrella or waterproof shoes. The only thing he could do was zip up his windbreaker and run while the water shot onto the top of his head, leaving a dark trail as it travelled down his clothes. It permeated the thin fabric of his backpack and inevitably ruined the papers inside. The sun had hidden behind a veil of grey, but Leo couldn’t look up to check if it had returned without the rain catapulting itself into his eyes.

            By the time his campus came into sight, Leo’s shoes had been drenched through. He sprinted, squelch by squelch, into the nearest building he could see. In the moment he had burst through the door, the water on his clothes had splattered onto parts of the floor. The rain had thrown off Leo’s typical route, a carefully planned path that took him all the places he needed to be and nowhere else in public. Thankfully, there was nobody else in the front of the building; he was happy for it. To be with people was difficult, he found. There was too much perceiving, and assuming, and talking, talking, talking.

            In the lobby of his campus building, the rain was surprisingly pleasant. It hit hard and rhythmically against the walls, although inside the sound was muffled enough so that it wasn’t much more than a soft, metronomic reverberance. Nature was asking to be let in, to tear through the doors and rooms that humans had built up. This is my land, the rain was saying, and I command to be given it back. Yet all it could do was splash against the door before dripping back down and diffusing into the soil of the lawn. Leo knew that as long as he was inside, it was safe and it was quiet, and it made him feel a warmth in his stomach despite the frigid waters outside.

            Leo stayed in that building for a while, allowing his clothes to dry. He would have left sooner if not for the fact that the rain only seemed to get more intense. He didn’t mind much being stuck there – there was no meeting for him to conduct, no club he had to attend, no friend waiting for him back at his dorm. He was glad that the people in the building he was in had elected to stay in their rooms. Maybe they were enjoying the sound of the rain as it struck their windows.

            It wasn’t until the rain finally stopped that Leo realized the extent of it. The ground was soaked through. The gutters were still filled with water that had become small creeks, flushing stray leaves and the remains of small insects around. His campus had been in a more elevated area, and as he looked down from the hill his building was on, he could see that the lowest parts of town had been flooded.

            In the town, there were police cars, firetrucks and ambulances littering the wet streets. Houses near the ocean had needed to be evacuated. Flash flood, they called it. So much rain, and nobody had expected it. The river had overtaken the buildings closest to it.

Even Leo, avoidant of the town as he normally was, came down to see the damage. In the aftermath of the flood, he felt comfort in knowing he was invisible. He didn’t frequent the area, but he was familiar enough to understand that the parts of the town that had been flooded and evacuated seemed unnatural to be so empty. In particular interest to Leo was a certain strip of shops whose damage was temporarily ignored in favour of the residential areas and sprawling superstores. It wasn’t a popular area, but Leo knew it well. There was a building here – a tutoring centre – that he had come to often when he was younger, when he didn’t know the language of this place well enough and had to be sent off to a dimly lit room to practice reading and writing. He wasn’t sure whether his memories of the place were good or bad.

Behind the stores was a wide alley lined with dumpsters and landing docks for trucks. It confused Leo, then, that a flock of people were rushing towards this alley. There was the mumbling of a crowd coming from inside. He approached the alley, and although he tried to stay far away, he found he couldn’t see the source of the commotion without getting closer. He stuck to the side of the alley as he walked deeper inside. Whether or not the people passing by him gave him stray glances, he didn’t check, but the thought of it made him want to crumple like a piece of paper. It was too loud, far too loud here. The alley was too wide for Leo to keep track of what was happening on all sides of him.

The thing that kept him walking was that there was a smell. It was like the sea, except dirtier and muddier. Next, he noticed the small reflections of the sunlight that were scattered around the walls of the alley – there must have been something reflective, shining. When Leo finally did see what was there, surrounded by people, he forgot about the overwhelming sense of the alleyway.

Sitting, covered in a thin film of water and slime, was a mass of smooth skin and a thick, opaque tail. It had fins that fell limply on the ground, a wide-open mouth that opened way to a deep and dark throat.

There, motionless, on the concrete. A catfish that was longer than Leo was tall. His breath dropped down to the lowest part of his lungs, because the fish was gigantic, and it was beautiful.

━

            The next morning, Leo’s alarm rang before the sun had finished rising. He woke up and readied himself for the day with more vigor than was typical of him. Yesterday, the city had ushered everyone away from the fish, but Leo had stayed off to the side and watched. Because of the flood, there was too much to do for the city to handle the fish as well, at least that was what the officials had said. They left it there until someone could be sent to remove it. It was dead, after all. It wasn’t going to do anything. That meant that now, it would still be there, and Leo could come back to it unburdened by the crowd.

            Leo rushed down the hill of his campus and throughout the city. The flood had only affected the lowest parts of the town with any degree of severity. If you stood anywhere near the top half of the hill and didn’t look down, you wouldn’t have known there was a flood at all. Leo passed by the row of stores again before stepping into the alley. There were no cars or dumpsters in it now. He had assumed the city wouldn’t put much care into warding anyone off from the alley, and he was right. There were only a few scattered cones and a line telling him DO NOT ENTER. It was a single piece of tape, and it was easy to step under and walk past.

Off at the other end of the alley, he could see the yellows and whites of some cones and tape blocking the opposite side. On his left was the back entrance of the tutoring centre, and to his right that of a convenience store. The catfish was positioned in the same manner it was before. Without the buzz and pull of the crowd, Leo could take a closer look at the fish than before. It didn’t have barbells like other catfish did. The top of its body was a sterile pencil-lead grey, while the bottom was tender and white. The eyes, at a distance, looked like something a child might draw – an off-white circle with a smaller, darker circle in the middle as the pupil. Looking at it closely, though, revealed all the particles, the layers of it. There was a shine to each one. The particles crowded around the middle of the eye and then exploded out towards the end. Specks of the eye glittered in the light like a nebula.

Leo wondered how nature could’ve known to create something so intricate. It was an enormous creature, at least six feet long. The officials had said it was over four hundred pounds, and that was the reason they were having trouble removing it. Yet nature had known how to engineer something of this size in the same way it did all the smaller fish.

I heard they’ve blocked off the whole street. Leo jolted up as he heard a voice. Is the bus still running? Another one. How long will it be blocked? The first voice again, or maybe a completely new one. Leo didn’t know. The only thing he was sure of was a compulsion to hide himself from sight. He scampered away from the fish and flattened himself into the alcove that made up the back door of the tutoring centre and waited for the voices to pass. His heart was beating hard and rapidly.

The back door of the tutoring centre hadn’t changed in the time since he had last used it so many years ago. On his first day here, he had accidentally used this entrance because he couldn’t navigate to the front door. He had gotten scared the moment he came out, because the alley was dark and wet and unfamiliar to him. When someone from the tutoring centre found him, they did so because they could hear his cries through the second-floor window. Leo remembered the laugh of that employee when they found him – it was light and airy, but the closeness of the alley walls made it echo.

The voices Leo was hiding were long gone, but Leo didn’t move, not yet. He sat on the stairs of the back entrance and admired the fish, majestic as anything he had ever seen, even in a place like this.

The employee had brought Leo back inside the building, yelled I found the kid, he went through the back and got scared. Then they had given him an apple-flavoured juice box before guiding him out the front entrance, back into the storefront Leo was familiar with. The juice was metallic and so, so sweet.

All of it seemed so ridiculous to him now.

━

            The greatest of Leo’s personal accomplishments, to him, was the path he had marked out for his daily life. There were four possible routes arcing around the campus and the town, and between them they covered every possible place Leo would need or want to be. The first category was much larger than the latter. In his dorm, he had a large map of the region. Each route was marked by a differently-coloured erasable marker. Leo sat at his desk, stared at the map, and after some trial-and-error, found the most efficient way to include one new location in his route: the alley of the tutoring centre.

            He visited the catfish several times throughout the course of the day. It was a place for him to study, or to stay away from the crowds, or just to sit. It was funny in a sick way. He had vowed, a long time ago, to never come back to the tutoring centre. He hated it all: the endless worksheets, the windowless rooms, the carpeted hallways. And yet there he was, returning again and again within a day. Once, staring at the fish, something materialized in his head. Yumo. It was meaningless, a random series of sounds with no particular significance. But suddenly, Yumo was the fish, and the fish was Yumo, and it made so much sense.

            Leo didn’t notice when he began to speak to Yumo. It started as something under his breath, almost to himself, until quickly enough he was speaking at full volume. He liked Yumo. It didn’t care how much Leo spoke and didn’t speak back with worries of its own. Leo was never good at responding to people, but Yumo didn’t need him to be. Yumo wasn’t a person, he supposed. But then maybe he didn’t want to be one either. For a moment, he imagined being in his dorm room, Yumo beside him in a giant tank. People would enter and Leo would point to the tank and say here’s my friend, have you met?

            At some point, Leo started bringing rocks to the alley. He had always looked for nice rocks around campus, keeping his head low and close to the ground to search. They had been piling up, and he needed a place to put them. Today, he had brought three: a red, smooth pebble, one stone covered in white, shining patterns, and another that was perfectly shaped like a triangular prism. He placed them by Yumo’s head, right in front of its eyes.

            Yumo had moved ever so slightly in the two days it had been since it originally washed up here. It wouldn’t be noticeable to anyone other than Leo, anyone who didn’t come to the alley often. Leo walked up to Yumo and examined a shallow dent behind its right eye, something he hadn’t noticed before.

            For the first time, Leo put his hand on Yumo’s head. The skin had lost some of its sheen from the first day, but it was still smooth, a deep grey. It smelled like mud and plants, in a relaxing way.

            “Yumo,” Leo mumbled. He smiled at the sound of it, hearing the name out loud for the first time. It wriggled through the air. “Yumo Yumo Yumo Yumo.” The name left his mouth like a secret.

            Later, Leo did some research in the library. He took out a book on fish species and flipped to C. He sat at a table in the corner and eyed the study group sitting on the other end of the row. They were quiet, at least.

Catfishes that grew to Yumo’s size were scientific anomalies anywhere in the world, much less in his town, but he learned that it wasn’t unheard of. There were other Yumos out there, somewhere.

Catfish were bottom feeders by nature – they slunk along the bottom of rivers and ate whatever was easiest to get. They didn’t use their eyes as much as they did their sense of smell and touch. Perhaps Yumo had gotten the dent from hitting a rock on the river floor.

Catfish, in some seasons, fought each other for territory. The dent may have been from a scuffle for land with another fish.

Catfish were prone to genetic defects. Yumo might’ve been born with a divot on its head. Leo wondered whether, if it was the case that Yumo was simply born wrong, it ever felt sad about that. If it knew it was different than the other fish. Here, he supposed, nobody knew or cared that Yumo might’ve had a genetic defect. It was all too unfamiliar for anyone to notice one more strange thing.

A cold grip materialized around Leo’s shoulder, and a ripple of fear radiated up his spine. Somebody else. He twisted his back around like a marionette, both to move his hand and to see who the hand was attached to. Above him stood a man around his age, with a thin moustache above his mouth and thick eyebrows. He had dark green eyes that were bold and large.

Leo struggled to breathe – his throat was drying and tightening and sticky all at the same time. The man’s mouth was moving, but there was too much of a shrill in Leo’s ears to hear much. He was suddenly aware of just how lost he had been in the book; he had completely failed to keep track of what was around him in all directions. Stupid and careless.

Again, the man was saying something. Leo couldn’t think, but he could feel himself beginning to sweat. The walls of the library seemed to curve upwards and shoot up to the black infinity of the library ceiling. He tried to make out the mouth movements of the man into a word, and he kept seeing fish, fish, fish. That couldn’t have been right, but it also could’ve been exactly right, and there was too much talking and gesturing and the imminent, excruciating closeness to Leo of someone expecting an answer from him.

Leo’s lips were clasped together like a safe. When the man finished talking, he nodded and then nodded again. His heart was beating too fast for him to feel the individual pulses. The man’s eyes flickered between expressions for half a second before he left and walked away. Leo stood up despite the knot in his stomach. His teeth rattled in his mouth like stones as he departed the library. He hadn’t even put the book back, but there was no time to think about that now. He needed to leave and not come back.

━

Leo woke early again the following day. The sky was dark, cloudless. There was no need to examine his map today – he had only one destination in mind.

When Leo arrived at the tutoring centre, he heard voices coming from the alley. Police, maybe. But upon peeking his head into the alleyway, he instead bore witness to a group of what seemed to be teenagers.

There were four of them, and they were standing around Yumo in pairs. One of them had a stick, and he was poking Yumo’s tail with it. The skin of the fish flopped up and down, up and down, each fall back onto the ground letting loose a small dispersion of water from the puddle of last night’s rain. Another girl prodded Yumo’s head with her finger.

Leo stood just barely in the alleyway, staring. The police tape had fallen to the ground, and the cones were knocked aside. His hands were dug deep into the pockets of his jacket. A laugh from one of the teenagers echoed down the alleyway. A sneaker nudged at Yumo’s side. They knocked over his stones without realizing. Leo’s throat clenched, but he only looked on, wide-eyed, until the teenagers left.

Once he was sure they were gone, he walked to Yumo, kneeling down and placing his hand on her head.
            “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I should have done something.” Yumo’s tail, already delicate, seemed more beaten up than before. Her eyes stared up at Leo, incriminating him in his refusal to act. He checked the rest of her body for bruises, noting a few ones that the teenagers had made. Again, Yumo watched him. A tear left Leo’s eye. His apology was meaningless. He had done nothing.

Until the afternoon, Leo stayed by Yumo’s side. She was beginning to change. Her skin had decayed more, her eyes had sunk more into her head, and her tail was limper. The smell of the alley had gone sour. A miasmic stain had spread onto the ground she lay on.

It was when the sun was at its highest point, when it shone directly onto Yumo and illuminated the shine on her skin, that Leo heard more voices coming from outside the alley. There would be no hiding this time. He stuck his head out and saw a group of students in the parking lot of the storefront. Many of them he recognized, and that was when he noticed one in particular: the man from yesterday, with the eyes and the moustache. He was standing in the centre of the group, laughing. They were positioned directly in front of the tutoring centre, and so Leo assumed they must’ve been going to the restaurant a few stores down. On the other side of the street, Leo could see a construction crew, moving like a herd down to the lower parts of town, surely to help repair the flood damage.

The tutoring centre cast a shadow over the parking lot; you could see the silhouette of the jagged edges of the centre’s roof. There was a time Leo had stood there, his entire head and upper body soaked. At home, he had tried to drink from the hose, but it got out of control and sprayed water all over him. He had stood in the sun in front of the tutoring centre, trying to dry off, but he couldn’t in time for class. He sat in the middle of the room slowly oozing water onto the desk. There was a worksheet that day, but the water dripped onto the questions and rendered most of it impossible to read. The only thing Leo could remember was a phrase in bold letters at the top of the paper: SPEAK CLEARLY!

Leo watched the construction crew on the other side of the road. They had orange hats and high-visibility vests. They wanted to be seen. The group of students from his school were slowly migrating toward the restaurant. Their collective steps echoed around the parking lot as they moved away from him.

He turned his head back into the alley, and Yumo was lit up gold in the sunlight.

━

Leo was busy most of the next day. At lunch, the dining hall served fish. He couldn’t force himself to eat it.

When the sun was setting, he finally found the time to leave campus. He beelined down the hill toward the storefront. There were many cars in the parking lot that day, all lined up and boldly coloured. The lower parts of town were beginning to rebuild after the flood.

At this angle, the sunlight would’ve lit Yumo’s belly. Leo knew it was beginning to rot, but he didn’t think of that. Surely, the sun would make it look better. In his hands were a couple more rocks he had found throughout the day to place at Yumo’s side.

There was something markedly strange about the alley that day. Leo didn’t realize it until later, but it was the smell. There was no more odour of dirt and leaves, of mangroves and water rushing with small crabs and fish. It was only the stench of concrete and cleaning supplies. Before he could think too much on it, Leo turned into the alley, but Yumo wasn’t there.

He ran to the spot Yumo had been, but the only thing left was a faint splotch on the ground. It was half-wiped away as if someone had gone through with bleach and sterilized the whole alleyway. Leo scurried around the alleyway, looking in every nook and cranny he could find for Yumo, although most of them were too small to fit in anyway. The city, he realized, noting the lack of police tape or cones. They took her.

Leo stood in front of the splotch on the floor. He imagined the glossy bulk of her side before it began to rot. Her eyes. The diffraction of light on her tail. Yumo, he mouthed.

He didn’t want to think about where the city might’ve taken all of her. Dumped into a landfill or sanitation centre. Driven in the back of a truck, jolting up and down with each speed bump, until the drivers took her body out and dumped her back into the sea.

Catfish are bottom feeders. Leo wondered if she was sunken in the river. If she were being eaten by her own kind. He stumbled back and sat down on the stairs of the tutoring centre. He tried to look up, but the green edge of the centre roof blocked most of the sky.

━

Leo was in the dining hall again when it happened. In the week since Yumo had been taken, he had found it hard to sleep. His days were more of a stumbling haze than before. He had begun to miss classes in order to sleep more, although he never could. Today’s lunch was something mostly unidentifiable, or maybe it was getting harder for Leo to taste things.

Pat. Pat. Pat. It sounded like someone stepping softly, except Leo knew that was wrong because it was all around him. It wasn’t a person at all – no, it was rain.

Leo raised his eyes to the glass panes that spanned the dining hall to see the rainstorm that had seemingly been conjured out of nowhere. The droplets of water were glinting, and they were pounding down hard on the walls of the dining hall. Leo backed away from his table and dropped his spoon on his tray.

It was coming down harder now, harder and faster. Leo moved, in a trance, to the exit of the dining hall and hurried across campus. He could feel the bite of the cold rain against his t-shirt, but he didn’t care.

On the field of campus, Leo could see the entire town as well as the thick rain cloud that hovered over it. At the bottom of town, the river was frothing and swirling. Urgently, Leo examined the ground around him, selecting three rocks to pick up and stuff into his pockets. A sharp edge on one of them dug into his palm. They were covered with water and shining. Then, he began his migration.

Without a pause, he began the run down the slippery walkway out of campus and to town. He watched the river when it was visible in the gaps between trees. Though the river was too far and the rain too thick to see clearly, he thought he could make out a dark shape, formless and writhing through the furious rush of the river. He closed his mouth and held his breath. It was gigantic, and it was beautiful.