A pablano pepper, green like the sea, gracefully swirled across a dance floor, more beautiful than Cinderella. The pepper was alone, in a ballroom that looked as if it was made for the aristocrats of Russia before the revolution. The pepper had no eyes or eyebrows to express emotions with, no real legs or arms to move, and yet the pepper spun, sprinted, lept magically into the air, tumbled, stretched and curtsied around the room. Gradually, almost unnoticably, over hours of time, the pepper began to look like a woman wearing a dress, green like the sea, with hair made of coral reefs. And so the pepper became a woman, and the woman began to cry and her tears made an ocean that connected her to the sea. She swam deeper and deeper, breathing the water as if it were the air, or she, a fish. Faster and faster, through rocky crevasses, far beneath ocean liners and fishing nets, her dress began to fragment, and she lost all that was human about her.

She was a red snapper. Nothing mattered anymore, except to live and breathe and die a red snapper.

-----

to be continued...