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If you drive far enough into the mountains, past old-news fires left to clean up the wilderness, you’ll find a door with a small brass bell on a red cord. Pull the door open, and ask the first dark-haired lady you find for food. She will give you hot tea while you wait. Heat up your blood, she says, so you won’t feel the day’s heat so much.
She will disappear and leave you with a fish. It will bump its thick open lips against the surface of the water for something to do. Or maybe it is an air-breathing koi. A wildfire-smoke-breathing, hot air kolorado koi.
It will submerge, gathering stones with its prehensile lips, sucking what green there is from their sides and rejecting them with a slow thump to the substrate again, building a self-settling cairn. Leveling again, the fish will propel itself in its scale-spare armor, more chinks than mail, forward with purpose. It will swim forward forever for a moment.
Look down at your tea when it collides stupidly with its own face. Maybe don’t laugh. It’s ten thousand miles from its lily-decked, cool, murky lair. It will never rub long sides with other koi, bespotted and bejeweled, enchanted cattle, popping fat lips at the surface and disappearing together into a terranean cloud.
Tea leaves will drift in your cup. Drink them down; don’t wait for them to settle. You don’t want to know, and don’t tell the koi its fortune either.
Thank the dark-haired lady for her hospitality, step outside, warm-blooded against the sun, and come home.
“Heavens to Betsy, Liv. Just tell me to pick up Chinese food.”
“No.”
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