something fishy

Exiting my Nissan Sentra, I walked on the crunchy snow in the parking lot. I like that squeaky, stiff, yet hard rubbery sound when the snow is packed and the temperatures are frigid. Reminds me of a dentist putting a filling into a cavity. Though it is after 10 p.m., the lot is brightly lit. Security cameras are strategically placed in a corner and on the sides. Wait. Stop. Rewind. Step back. Is that a fish? It is. A dead fish, mouth and one eye open on its side, scales silvery in the January moonlight. Bloodied in the middle as if shot. The nearest body of water, a lake, is a mile away. This Surprise Fish Presence (SFP) sparks a gazillion questions, some you are already formulating, others being fished from the open air of my imagination. Aside from the obvious how and why it got to this spot, there's the who placed it and was it by accident or on purpose. Was it a coded "sleep wit da fishes" warning? To whom? Not likely me. It wasn't snoozing near my car and its apparitional appearance preceded my parking in this spot anyway. I suppose someone could have gone to the regional market (we don't have a fish market as New York, Boston, Tokyo, San Francisco, and Omaha has have), bought a bass or perch or whatever my Piscean Poseur is, and dropped it, tossed it, placed it, planted it. Maybe it's performance art. I do not know the answer to any of these questions or to any of a myriad queries associated with this Neptunian Mystery. This terrestrial sighting, um, spawned a stinging array of additional questions upon finding the SFP gone two days later. Gone as if never having put in an unannounced, uncamouflaged cameo in the first place. This bothers me more. Did I dream or delusionally fantasize the Unidentified Fishy Observation (UFO)? I did not. It was there. I have no corroborating evidence, no cellphone photo. My observation is evidence-based reality, or reality-based evidence. It was there, staring at my two eyes with its dead-pan unmonocoled cyclops of a visage (other eye peering blindly into the icy snowpack). I was there, and so was one dead unfake fish. It was. Believe me.