When I invite you into my living room and you complain that my rug is a giant and slippery tongue, I consider kicking you out so I can fish for my next date. But you’r cute with your slicked back fins and huge, unblinking eyes. I wiggle through the flexible baleen as if they were beaded curtains and offer you a salty cocktail.

Outside, the temperature is a brisk and liquid forty degrees, but in here it’s warm, even balmy. I rub against your scales and I can tell you like it, though you continue to stare straight ahead, cranky that we’re not in quiet coral, toasting oyster shells.

Our humpback host begins to feed, and we slosh around like toy boats in a storm. Two or three drinks in, I laugh and whoop. You flash your pointy piranha teeth. We hold each other through the rolls that would be nausea-inducing if we weren’t half-sloshed, buzzing with the sense of possibility, with the excitement of later tossing each other against rubbery lips and rolling through glittery plankton. Spawn me, I whisper into your ear slit. Spawn me, now.

It's been a long time since I’ve had a visitor in this oral cavity. Longer since I felt the bristle of attraction.

You start to look iridescently green, losing interest in the curve of my belly and slope of my head.

Krill crackles around us and I realize you want me for my ornamental pattern and the black mantle over my eyes, that you’ll swim off after we jump bones. It also strikes me that you’re small enough to fit down our host’s throat. The next time the humpback opens his mouth to scoop in great waves of sea water, I guide you to the dark hole that leads to digestion and oblivion and press myself against the fringe of baleen. 

Your lips pucker, your face as surprised as a netted betta as you spiral downward with the rest of the bait ball.

I can’t help but laugh and laugh. I’ll find an aquatic creature who appreciates my cleverness and quick reflexes, who’s as excited as I am to grope for trout in a peculiar river. Perhaps I’ll leave this place, lay my eggs on a sandy mandala created by a puffer, scoop the eggs over my tongue and find a nice mate with a decorative anal fin and let him ejaculate into my mouth.

Or I could always swap my sex, like my father did before me, and complete the act of creating fishlets alone. Fixing myself another aperitif, I snuggle between baleen plates and sip as a swarm of crustaceans wiggles by. I gaze beyond them for my next catch.