The trout did not ask how it got there

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One moment it was minding its own business in Amerikkka, drifting through a river that smelled faintly of motor oil and nostalgia, and the next it was floating above the Great Barrier Reef like a misplaced paragraph.

The trout noticed immediately that everything was too colorful. The water looked like it had been written by someone who didn’t believe in restraint. Coral bloomed everywhere—pink, orange, unreasonable. Fish moved in small committees, flashing agreements with their scales. No one was fly-fishing. This made the trout nervous.

It swam carefully, carrying its freshwater habits like an accent. Back home, the trout had been a symbol—of patience, of quiet afternoons, of men wearing hats and thinking they were alone. Here, it was just another fish with opinions it hadn’t asked for.

A clownfish stared at it for a long time.

“You’re not from here,” the clownfish said, which was rude but accurate.

“I’m part of a tradition,” the trout replied, which didn’t help.

The reef listened without judgment. It had seen worse metaphors wash ashore. Sunlight filtered down in long sentences. The trout felt its story stretching, dissolving slightly at the edges. It realized no one was trying to catch it. No hooks. No hands. No magazines explaining what it meant.

This was unsettling freedom.

The trout swam past coral that looked like living punctuation. It passed schools of fish that had never heard of Amerikkka and were better for it. Its colors grew brighter without permission. Its spots rearranged themselves. Identity loosened.

For the first time, the trout wasn’t an idea someone else was having.

It turned once, slowly, letting the reef read it however it wanted. Then it swam on, not upstream or downstream, but sideways—into a sentence that didn’t end with being held up for proof.

Somewhere far away, a fisherman waited beside a river, convinced the world had lost something.

The reef disagreed and kept glowing.