Pescatarian
Lydia O’Donnell
Every winter, the ice fishermen sit on the sky.
The ice is always here, the ships are not. When the fishermen first descended, their company named this season winter.
Their company also named our village Hooke’s Town. We don’t know why. We heard the fishermen talking about history. We don’t learn Earth history on Europa.
We are happy about the fishermen's loose pockets and looser tongues. They are not like the northern scientists who would beat us off the sky if they could.
The fishermen like our view of the Great Red Spot. They tell us about their blue skies, but we have trouble believing them. We cannot imagine it. Our sky is the terrible ice under our feet. Above us there is either nothingness or the frightening swirls of Jupiter.
When the fishermen are here the days are fast. Money and trinkets flow. There is news from planets we don’t understand. The fishermen wish for the entire village to celebrate their catches. Every hand should be warmed by a cup of cider.
We cannot sleep at night with the fishermen here. We want to stop them. We can’t stop them. The danger is why they fish. We know danger is only fun from afar. And we know the ice is thinner than it appears. We know what will happen.
And on the twentieth winter, it did.
Winter was starting sooner and lasting longer. The mayor was happy. The elderly villagers were not. They still remember the great split of fifty years earlier, the homes and faces drifting underneath the ice. To drill was to dance with catastrophe.
But the fishermen’s money maintained our anti-radiation shell. So, like every year, we plastered smiles on our faces and left our houses with cider and dumplings and dancing copper fish. The fishermen are big spenders.
Company robots unfurled tents onto the ice. Bright orange on our stark sky. All the tents were large, but one stood apart from the rest.
This tent was owned by the heartiest fisherman. He came with the first ship and every year since. This twentieth winter he brought his eldest son. The handsome son stirred up a fuss among the younger villagers.
At night, the son took joyrides with his friends. They raced around the sky in loops on snowmobiles. We watched their lights from our cottages. The lights soothed our loneliness, a chronic condition on this moon. But the lights were very small. Comfort made way for fear. We could not stop thinking about what was beneath our feet, beneath the ice.
All we could do was hope tomorrow’s catch would not be too successful.
When we served cups of cider, we took in the day’s catch. Large fishes were tossed behind tents. Small monsters were stretched out on display. The ice preserved them. These were the fishermen's trophies.
The son fisherman, by then famous in our village, was miserable. He was too good to kick the ice and pout. But we saw his eyes. Among the young fishermen, he was the only one not to catch a monster.
The lights of his snowmobile became brief desperate flashes. He fished through the night. A young villager wanted to bring him a blanket. Her parents forbade her from leaving their cottage. We all felt sad for the son fisherman. But we did not want to die underneath the sky.
We hoped the son fisherman’s luck would not change.
On the twenty-sixth day of winter the air over the ice was still. The day was normal. But when we remember the day, we see ominous signs in our memories. A new coin-sized storm on the planet above us, a stomach sickness among the village children, a sparking lightbulb in the tavern.
Evening began; the fishermen came to our village for dinner. The son fisherman was not among them. His father was not concerned. He downed a jug of dark beer. He laughed to his friends about his determined son.
The drunk pack of fishermen ambled back to the tents. It was dark out. We were exhausted.
We locked the tavern up. We don’t know how long the father fisherman tried to knock in the door. An hour after closing, we heard yelling at the home of the mayor. We peeked out our windows.
The father fisherman’s red cheeks shook. He was hysterical. We had trouble understanding him, but we heard one word clearly: son, son, son.
The mayor knew what happened. The father fisherman dragged him onto the snowmobile. The mayor allowed himself to be dragged. He hollered back and a few of us grabbed our sleds and followed.
By then, we understood the situation. The son stayed back to fish, determined to catch a monster while the others drank. The father returned, drunk, to his tent. The son was nowhere. His line was gone. The father thought the son took the snowmobile out. The snowmobile was next to the tent. The father thought the son was playing a joke. That was not the son’s personality. The father thought he was just too drunk. He sat on the ice. He stared down the ice-fishing hole his son carved. Down, down into the ocean, deeper than the old oceans of Earth. On the edge of the hole was a handprint against the ice.
The father remembered our words to him on his first visit, twenty years ago. ‘People should be on the sky, or as you call it, the ground.’ Even the northern scientists would not send submersibles into the ocean.
We saw everything in the tent. The handprints of the son, and the other marks, the inhuman struggle. The next morning the father was inconsolable. He threatened to jump down the hole. We did not try to stop him because he stopped himself. We delivered hot water bottles and tea. We kept our children locked in the village. The fishermen called their company ship. The captain was apologetic but could not get to Europa before next week.
A naïve villager foolishly told the father that we had ways to reanimate bodies in the ice. It’s true that we can defeat that death. But we knew the son’s body was long gone. Still, this gave the father hope. We felt sorry for him. He insisted his son slipped through the ice. He could not imagine the being that dragged him down.
The father called the northern scientists. We dreaded them. But we could not be so rude to the grieving fisherman. We groaned when the silver ice sled sails appeared on the horizon.
The scientists were excited. They did not bother comforting the father. They administered sedatives to all the fishermen. We could not stop them.
Instruments appeared around the tent. We did not know what they were. The scientists’ eyes shone with joy.
A paranoid villager wondered if the scientists allowed the fishermen to come here all these years so this would happen. We hushed him. Robots buzzed around the surface of the ice. Some robots swam underneath it. We prayed the whole field wouldn’t collapse.
When the sedatives wore off, the scientists told the father that they were looking for the body. We knew better. Then they gave the father another large dose.
The humming began. The scientists sent us back to our village. Our sleds were full of drugged fishermen. For once the innkeeper did not complain about all her customers. We watched the scientists through our binoculars.
There were glowing shapes beneath the ice. They were not robots. The scientists were shouting at each other. One screamed. We hid our heads under pillows.
When the humming stopped, the glowing shapes sank out of sight. We could not even look at the scientists. We were badly shaken.
The next day, the ship descended. The scientists shooed us away in our own village. They took the fishermen and whispered to the captain. The captain looked out at our moon. His expression was inscrutable. We hoped he would talk to us. Instead, his ship departed. We could not even say goodbye.
The scientists barricaded the large tent. Then they returned north.
Sometimes when we wake up in the middle of the night we see the lights of the son’s snowmobile zipping around the ice. We press our hands against the window, overjoyed.
But then we realize, these lights are not on top of the sky but beneath it.
LYDIA O’DONNEL is a first-year MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Alabama. She enjoys writing about outer space and brutal midwestern winters. “Pescatarian” is her first publication.