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Raining Fish

The first fish hit the pavement at our feet with a splat that was a sickly liquid splat with ruptured tissue and smelly innards flying happily around looking for a nice suit or polished shoes to foul. 

Another one, bigger, fell squishilly some distance away.

“Quick!  Up here, lads!” a voice called from one of the porches and we ran up there out of the hail of fish that was turning into a regular storm.   The Higg’s Moon must be waxing over Cleveburg again.

We got up the stairs and onto the porch just in time.  The big fish started dropping like shit balloons and everyone walking found a porch to occupy until the Higg’s Moon passed.

Violent violin music broke free from behind the old man’s screen door like some medieval heavy metal and accentuated the bizarreness of the scene.

“Paganini, lunatic violin, I love it” said the old man, smiling as we cringed away from the violin attack.

We cringed from the dropping fish, the surreal music, and the awful smell. 

Oh God, what have we wrought?

The Automatic Hoses cycled on to try to wash the squirming fish down the Automatic Drains, set strategically down the curb to rid the site of the stink as quickly as possible, but neighborhood kids dared the falling onslaught to run out in the mess and grab some fine looking salmon that were thrashing only yards from us. 

“Ten bucks lads, bring me a nice one” called the old man to the kids, and they ran a twenty pounder up to the porch, and took their pay, and went further to some other neighbors who like the pike, or some mudshark.

The old man stomped on the fish’s head to make him stop, and took it inside, calling to his wife.

“The world has gone bonkers” Tommy said to me.

I wondered how long it would take the Higgs Moon to pass by overhead.  The Higgs moon dragged ocean around the world and ocean dropped from the sky like it was doing here today

The Moon that used to be Geneva Switzerland was about the size of a basketball but it weighed something on the order of the Himalayas and it accumulated more mass every orbit.  It left a perfectly smooth half sphere of emptiness about six miles in diameter at the France-Swiss border.  It rang like a bell and its orbit oscillated in a mad ellipse that changed according to some unknown harmonic resonance.  It orbited west to east, opposite everything else.