by Val Rich
Fish out of water; he’d never heard the expression before. He flipped it over in his mind’s eye, watching it flex and struggle. He was more of an eel, surely. Slim and sinewy. He stretched his legs out long under the table, resting his wrists on the keyboard.
English poetry? Why study such a thing? A boy from Las Vegas in an ancient British city with its flint-walled churches and low-ceilinged taverns.
‘Tavern? What’s a tavern?’ he’d asked.
‘Ha! You’re a real fish out of water, aren’t you?’ The girl had mocked gently.
Gasping breaths, squirming scales; iridescently beautiful but writhingly repellent. The grotesque imagery had hooked him. He uncrossed his ankles; sat up straight. He swallowed hard, closed his laptop, got up. He would walk. He would feel the cobbles beneath his boots and he would feel grounded. Out of water, but once more able to breathe.
He walked east, away from the centre of the city, cobbles gradually smoothing into pavements of mottled slabs or sometimes dense, black tarmac. He turned corners, crossed roads, until he reached his new home from home. He saw academic buildings, thin fir trees, and a lake. A large lake that welcomed this fish out of water with its unspoken depths, far, far away from that poisoned oasis in the red Mojave Desert.
‘Adlestrop’. The vowels rolled; the consonants kicked. His tutor had told him: ‘Edward Thomas, 1915. Read it for next time.’ He kept walking, enjoying the solidness beneath his feet.
‘Can I help?’ The small woman looked up at him; enquiring, smiling.
‘My card. It won’t scan.’
The librarian nodded. She left, sharp strike of heel against hard, wood floor. He glanced down at a woman who was queuing behind. Her smile and kind eyes said: ‘Don’t worry. No hurry.’ He felt peaceful; at home. Entranced by her, maybe? The brief spell was broken by the librarian’s cough. She scanned him through; a swift masterstroke.
‘Get your card checked.’
Polite but impatient. He knew she meant well. He made for the stairs. ‘Adlestrop’. Third floor.
‘Yes, I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.’
He read the words aloud, listening to the short syllables of un-won-ted-ly as the train ground to a halt. Three stanzas followed. Time standing still as all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire sang, in a misty, gossamer haze, punctuated by the urgent, heralding trill of a blackbird perched close by. Hiss of engine steam. Sharp clearing of throat. He felt his breath tighten. A fish out of water.
He had seen her again, on the library stairs. His step felt sure as he went on his way.
Two weeks passed before he saw her once more. He asked her if she knew the British poets of the First World War. Her reply was ‘No’. Ten days later (he had counted), they discussed what she’d read.
‘In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.’
The words fell slowly from her mouth. He watched her lips: ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’. They discussed her great grandfather, his father; Ypres and Saigon. Pretty names, nightmare places. Adlestrop, so English sing-song. He remembered: A tavern? What that girl had said.
‘You’re not a fish!’ The woman laughed loud, her smile kind. He felt home; his breath full, his breath easy, while the Tommy lay drowning in the depths of Owen’s poem.
One day, by the lake, he brought her the letter his mother had left. Whiskey-fuelled beatings, head shut in the door. The Vet’s unprocessed trauma processed red, black and blue on the woman he’d loved before he came home and knew of what man was capable; of what war could do. She had died, face under bathwater, bourbon breath on her neck. The unprocessed now processed, worked through, no breath left.
A fish out of water. ‘Don’t worry. No hurry.’ He remembered he could breathe.

Val Rich worked as a sub-editor in home interest magazines, but has swapped her red pen for the challenge of the blank page as she wrestles, in a good way, with her first piece of women’s fiction. Val lives near London, but spends time at the University of Lincoln, where she is studying for the MA in Creative Writing.