miCRo: “There Aren’t Many Predators in the Aquarium” by Emily Weber

[Editors’ note: We’re taking a one-week hiatus from miCRo next week for the AWP conference. Next piece posts on March 11!]

Associate Editor Jess Jelsma Masterton: As a writer, teacher, and editor, I strongly believe that tension holds a story together. Tension can come in many different forms, be it in the traditional Western fashion (a high-stakes conflict built up within the plot) or a more experimental approach (such as the juxtaposition of a piece’s structure and content). My favorite fiction often builds tension in ways that subvert my expectations. In “There Aren’t Many Predators in the Aquarium” Emily Weber pushes the central conflict to the periphery of both the scene and the narration. Danger lurks, not in the stingray pool, but amongst “tasteful jazz music” and “the smell of buttered vegetables.” The narration draws the reader’s attention simultaneously to the stingray tank and the conflict within the charity banquet that goes unsaid.

To hear Emily read her story, click below:

There Aren’t Many Predators in the Aquarium

Despite the implicit invitation, Heide did not want to touch the stingrays in the Touch-Me Tank. Instead she watched them swim and thought of the planes of a woman’s back. Not her own back, not the back of anyone in particular—just the backs of women, plural, no names or faces, swelling majestically into mountainous shoulder blades. Backs as valleys, backs as sweeping grasslands, hands as manifest destiny. Heide had come to the aquarium’s stingray pool to be alone. Away from tasteful jazz music, the smell of buttered vegetables, starched white napkins, the low rumble of mingling guests, the weight of her date’s hand on her waist, the burn of alcohol on his breath, the lights the lights the lights. How strange to call a glitzy charity event a benefit, she thought, watching the stingrays. Nobody benefits.

A young polo-shirted aquarium employee came to collect her. Called her ma’am. The children’s room was off-limits during the event; would she mind joining the rest of the guests?

Not at all, she told him, but one question first: “Do stingrays mind the dark?”

“They don’t use their eyes much,” he said. “They detect prey using electrical sensors.”

“And what about predators?” she asked. “How do they detect those?”

“There aren’t many predators in the aquarium, ma’am,” he said. He laughed.

Heide rested her empty champagne flute on the pool’s edge and plunged her hand into the cold water, brushing a stingray’s back. As it glided away, she thought of velvet and silicon and muscle walls. Had it seen her coming with its eyes or detected the electricity in her hand? In her heart? Maybe it had sensed her and allowed itself to be touched. Maybe she had wanted to touch it after all, and wanting was all that mattered.

Emily Weber’s work has been published in Gordon Square Review, Into the Void, Jersey Devil Press, Jellyfish Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. She works in digital marketing and lives near Philadelphia. She’s on Twitter @emilyweberwood. 

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