In These Queer Books, Animals Take on a Mythical Importance

When my friend and I planned to have a child together via IVF, we jokingly called her a baby fish, a salmon fry. A Fry is a stage in the salmon life cycle, after alevin but before parr, when the fish must begin to feed itself and swim free. This is a stage where they are most vulnerable to predators, birds, and larger fish, including larger salmon of the same species. While calling our future-kid a fish began as a joke, the vulnerability and brutality of fish-life seemed to me like a perfect metaphor for trying to have a kid when the only salmon we could afford was farmed, a process that I knew brought ecological destruction to wild fish populations. When the IVF process suddenly fell apart and I was left, again, with a childless future, my could-have-been child appeared to me as a fish; she was not a metaphor, she lived alongside me, she spoke to me, we went swimming in the Rockaways, I kept a tank of salt water by my bed. 

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