A Fish in the North Sea

A giant fish lives in the North Sea. Its silvery smooth body stretches for thousands of miles. When it turns, millions of tons of seawater churns up small fish from the bottom. When it flips its tail, islands far away are drowned in a tsunami. It swims in the familiar north sea but dreams of the strange south sea. The birds that fly between the two ends of the world tell stories of pink and purple coral bushes as large as islands, the sky that remains blue for years to decades without a shred of cloud, and the waves that glow green in the black night.

The fish is giant, but the world is vast, and there is much it has never seen. His heart yearns for the south sea.

So one day, when the air stirs with brewing wind and the sea stirs like boiling pot, the giant fish leaps into the air and morphs into a giant bird with brilliant white wings stretching for thousands of miles. It rises with the wind lifting the massive wings that tremble and shudder, struggling with the new way of swimming, swimming in air. Soon the bird learns to glide, glide with the flow of the air, just like it used to glide with the current in the ocean, the tips of its wings sensing and adjusting to the tiny turbulence.

The north sea retreats rapidly, ten thousand miles below. For a fleeting moment the bird is touched with melancholy, and it whispers goodbye to home and friends. The world opens a new dimension. It rises higher and higher, above layers of gray clouds, until it is bathed in blazing sunshine. A freedom sweeps through its entire being.