The carp pond was one of several small pools on the island, and the only one visibly teeming with life and rank death; a sordid breeding ground of heavy bodies whose prolific numbers displaced the amount of water necessary to survive. The fish had nowhere to swim. Until the rains came and fed the channel that fed the pond, they led profligate lives on their sides, stacked one on top of the other like harvested meat, reproducing themselves and dying from the ingestion of their own waste, from exposure to the sun and the air and the weight of their flesh pressing down upon them. A foul invisible gas of parturition and decay seeped from the hole, as if from a large open sore in the fleshy paunch of the earth, a wound spectacularly discolored and agitated into a gelatinous froth, quickened by the writhing orange and red bodies of the fish. These were like maggots in the sore, in their compact aggregation and abundance, in their seeming imperative to go deeper and spread wider the hole that contained them. Although dull and vapid, there was an innately sardonic aspect to their faces. The eyes of the fish betrayed an ironic sense of their fate and captivity, a resignation about their inherent design, an overheated life nourished and sustained on decrepitude, and so omnivorous that it consumed the very specimens of its own creation.
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