The Fishmonger's Anomaly

It was a sweltering August afternoon, the type that screams for the soothing balm of gin and tonic. But I wasn't in the mood to drink; I was more interested in the residue of a small-scale catastrophe playing out on Main Street. Heaped up on a pile of crushed ice outside Jacobson's Fish Mart were hundreds of dead fish, their clouded eyes in sharp contrast with the summer sky. Newell Jacobson, the grizzled fishmonger of our serene little town, had no reason for the mysterious mass death. I did not have to be Sam Spade to know that something was amiss.

Every time the clock struck three, the world shifted, and not in the usual way a drunk's world might after one-too-many glasses of the rotgut whiskey from the seedy joint on Van Buren Street. I'm talking about the kind of strange shift an average Joe would spot if he's been pounding at the same pavement for years. It was as though our town slipped into a groove from another dimension — just for a minute or two.

Sam, the mechanic from the end of the street, described it politely as a "time-slip." He was the only one privy to my secret. And so, every day, for that minute or two, objects appeared and vanished. Once a dinosaur fossil turned up in Betty-Lou's chicken coop, and in another instance, Monroe, the town's banker, found a set of diamond cufflinks in his bowl of oatmeal.

Today, it had been the fish from Jacobson's. One second their scales gleamed under the summer sun, live and vibrant. The next, the entire stock lay dead.

Later that evening, I found a stoneware jar at my doorstep, warm from the setting sun. Opening up the jar, that oh-so-familiar whiff of illicit distillation told me I was holding a batch of moonshine from beyond the rift. A note attached read, "Drink, it is good". Sure, it was moonshine, but from another dimension. I hesitated for a moment, gazed at the familiar buildings along the street, at the distant hills now turning a hazy purple in the evening's embrace. I was just your average guy, but boy, did I crave to feel something extraordinary.

It went down smoother than most, a fiery kiss that sent tendrils of warmth spiraling down my gut. The world started to swim a little, but in a pleasant way. I was feeling more expansive, more...exploitative. I walked over to the fish market. The fish, once proudly displayed in all their aquatic glory, were now deathly still. There was a symmetry — a whiff of otherworldliness about them.

Was I dreaming? Or was the moonshine hitting harder than expected? Not that it mattered anymore. Right then, normalcy felt overrated. Our existence, as I saw it, was just a state of constant transition across different dimensions, and these dead fish were just a glimpse of something greater.

That night under the inky-black of the celestial canopy, I gave my town a salute. Here I was, our sleepy little town's ambassador in a world reshuffled every day—an average person dealing with inter-dimensional moonshine and dead fish. And in that moment, bathed in moonlight and consumed by an otherworldly buzz, my mundane days didn't seem so mundane after all.