Gone Fishing / Short fiction by Sylvia Schwartz
The voting line went on for miles. Warned about delays, people calmly chatted about being proud to vote for the Right column and couldn’t understand anyone voting for the Wrong column. After all, who doesn’t want to be right? Eleanor wasn’t political and didn’t see how it affected her, but her boyfriend, Jake, was.
A young couple, like them, farther up in line, wore matching t-shirts that read Two Wrongs Will Never Make a Right, which Eleanor thought was funny until Jake explained it meant gays couldn’t make babies, which is why they were on the wrong side.
Eleanor didn’t know any gay people but thought the Wrongs should have picked a better party name. Their ads blasted the message: Better to Stand with the Unduly Wronged than to Align with the Righteous; while that sounded good, it wasn’t catchy.
She wished the voting line moved faster because she had two chapters to read for tomorrow night’s nursing class.
Jake’s brother, Jimmy D, waltzed over to join them. The bearded guy in a Harley leather jacket gave him a dirty look for cutting in until he saw Jimmy D’s t-shirt: Stay in the Right Lane or Die. They high-fived. Eleanor asked Jimmy D how the Wrong had gotten in his way.
“Take fishing,” he said. “The Wrong banned fishing during mating season.”
“Maybe it’s so you don’t kill them off and so you can catch more later.”
“I have the right to fish. Anytime. Anywhere,” he protested.
“We studied goldfish in high school science.”
“So?”
“We did experiments on how fish handle stress. We alternated between feeding and not feeding them, and they never knew what to expect and began to die. When the last one went belly up, I asked the teacher if I could bury it by the football field. She didn’t see anything wrong with that, but when I got there, kneeled on the ground, and unfolded the paper towel, a football player running laps stopped, demanding to know what I was doing. I told him. Fish stink, he said, which makes them the Wrong kind. People smell, too, I said. Yes, he said, but we can control that. Rights need to control Wrongs.”
“That would make a great bumper sticker,” Jimmy D said.
Eleanor thought so, too, and continued, “Then he picked up the fish and swallowed it.”
“He swallowed the dead goldfish? That’s sick,” Jake said.
“Whoa, I like it,” Jimmy D said.
“Me, too,” said the high-fiving guy. “We need to go on a fishing expedition!”
After Eleanor and Jake voted, they watched the campaign results on TV. Around midnight, the Right man, who won, stood at the podium and announced his initial plans: “The Right thing to do for the sake of this country is to remove all Wrongs.”
“What does that mean?” Eleanor asked Jake.
“What do you mean ‘what does it mean’? What does it sound like?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t ask,” Eleanor said. The whole topsy-turvy right/wrong wording confused her. When it was her turn to vote, she knew she was supposed to vote Right, but she kept thinking about that helpless fish and how quickly the Right swallowed it without a second thought. She wondered if she was Wrong to care about that.
“I don’t know how someone can be so book smart and life dumb,” Jake said. “The Right will round up all the Wrongs and eliminate them.”
Despite Eleanor voting Wrong and sealing her fate, she thought Gone Fishing would make a snappy slogan.
Sylvia Schwartz’s stories have appeared in several anthologies and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has been published in LitBreak, Five on the Fifth, The Write Launch, Bright Flash Literary Review, Ariel Chart International Literary Journal, and more. She is an assistant editor at Narrative Magazine. www.sylviaschwartz.com, @Aivlys99
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