Content: Arthur/TMWTPF, Animal death (fish)

"What's that?" asks the man with the painted face.

They’re sitting at the table where the hanging lamp casts a yellow glow between them. But the man with the painted face is still vivid and bright, as if lit by the sun.

"It's a brain," Arthur says, turning his journal for a moment so the man with the painted face can see. "I had an appointment with Dr. Kane today and there was a new poster on the wall - a diagram of a brain inside a skull. And all around it was water, like a goldfish in a bowl." He cups his hands like he's holding out a bowl for the man with the painted face to take. "It reminded me of something, so I explained it to her."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," Arthur says, returning to his drawing. "But she didn't understand so maybe it's stupid. Or crazy."

"I wanna hear it," the man with the painted face insists. "I keep telling you I'm smarter than her. I'll get it."

"Fine. Okay." Arthur sets his pen down and allows himself to drift two decades back, when he was still young - overburdened but freer than he'd come to be.

"When I was a kid there was a carnival that'd set up on the pier every summer. And when I was fourteen I went and asked for a job so I'd have an excuse to be away. I told them I was older and I know they didn't believe me but they let me work there anyway. I ran the game where people throw ping pong balls at rows of glass bowls with goldfish inside. A tent was set up that shaded me and maybe half the fish, but the ones in front were swimming in the sun."

He flips to a fresh page in his journal. Across its laddered lines he draws a row of frowning goldfish trapped in tiny bowls.

"It was so hot that summer and the poor little fish would boil in their water all day. Whenever one died I had to scoop it out and throw it away. By nighttime there’d be a hill of bodies piled up in the trash. I was really upset about those fish for a long time. I felt like I'd failed them and it was my fault they'd died. But eventually I understood that they would've died no matter what I did. It was the environment they were in that had killed them."

He remembers the graveyard of fish floating belly up, glinting orange in the sun. The sharp sound of plastic bouncing off glass. The laughter of strangers who never seemed to understand how cruel they were being. The rancid smell of rotting fish.

"Life's kinda like that, you know? Our brains are swimming in hot water and we're getting stuff thrown at us. Some people have an easier time because they're in the shade, or they're farther back and don't get hit as much. Even people right up front in the sun can survive. But some just...don't." He runs his eyes down the sad line of fish penned in his journal.

The man with the painted face rises and moves to stand behind him, trailing his fingers along the table's edge. As he bends to take Arthur's hand in his he can feel paint brush across his bare cheek. Together, at the end of the line, they draw a smiling goldfish floating upside down inside its tiny bowl - shaky and strange.

"This is what you mean." The man with the painted face tells him.

"Yeah," Arthur says. "That's what I mean."