When We Were Fish

Salient Magazine
Sep 29, 2025
1 min read

By Emily Johnston

When we were fish, it wasn’t practical to love. Fish need food, fish need to reproduce, fish need to swim, and then fish die. To bother with any sort of romance would be to willingly bump yourself down the food chain. But we aren’t fish anymore. We buy our food by the bag, we fuck for fun, we drive in fuel powered steel matchboxes and then we are shipped away to retirement homes to knit tea cosies and yell at customer service. Somewhere between fish and human, the goals got muddled, survival now sits at the bottom of a brown paper bag, between some loose fries and a Big Mac.

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