#FlashFictionFeb
Day 21 Write about something that scares you. (268 words)
If the past four years has taught us anything as a society in general, it’s how to be afraid of things. Everyone is so afraid of weird things that may or may not happen they haven’t even had time to be afraid of the weird things that have happened.
Like fish with arms.
Depending on how scared you’ve become of what boogeyman, a headline of “Fish with Arms,” might elicit a mental image of gabillions of cold-blooded gill-breathers with tiny cannons growing out of their head.
“Oh my God,” you think to yourself, “there are tens of millions more of them than us. We are doomed.”
Or you might think to yourself, “Good for them. Wonder what kind of ammo they’re using,” and phone your stockbroker for a hot tip on tiny aquatic cannon balls.
Fortunately, fish are not growing tiny cannons out of their heads. But I did see an article in which researchers from Harvard University and Boston Children’s Hospital were able to create mutant zebrafish with the beginnings of arms by tweaking just a single gene.
And with arms come thumbs, and with thumbs come all kinds of terrible things, like Twitter accounts. Never mind wondering why researchers from a children’s hospital are looking to arm fish, wonder how scary the conspiracy theories will be when some of the more bat-shit crazy news outlets get a whiff of it.
In closing, as scary as armed fish of any kind may seem, it seems to be the future. And in the future I will continue to fear people more than any fish with thumbs. Until the fish get Twitter accounts.
Then we are surely doomed.
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mrsahpahkah 