litlinks 2025

Go Fish

by Olive King, Canberra High School

The five of them took turns reading from the dim computer. As each person straightened and stepped back from the screen, their faces darkened and mouths hardened. It was as if a disease had befallen them. A chorus of murmurs danced around the room.

“This is bad…”

“Very bad indeed.”

“What do we do?”

Isla frowned. Her mental cogs whirred.

Suddenly, it struck her. An idea. A crazy idea, but an idea nonetheless.

They all bent in a tight huddle as she explained it.

“An undercover mission. Sneaking into ships… we’ll throw them back in. Rescue them. Imagine the ecosystems we could save. This could be a revolutionary step.”

Heads bobbed up and down, followed by a procession of thoughtful hmmmms. A voice emerged from the hum, asking the question that burned in all their minds.

“So, who will go?”

Isla drew in a deep breath.

***

“Isla, you don’t have to do this.”

Jane’s tone was even and calm, but her eyes betrayed her. Two icy blue pits of anxiety and concern. Holding her gaze was like holding up a mountain. Isla’s muscles tightened and she struggled to breathe, but she didn’t look away. She dug her fingernails deep into the car seat’s soft cushion.

“I’m sorry, but we both know why that isn’t true.”

She leapt out the car, leaving Jane apprehensive and alone in the driver’s seat. The dim starlight bent down to greet her, caressing her arms with its tickly touch.

Good luck, it whispered to her, you’ll need it.

Isla crawled slowly across the sand towards the looming white shape on the shore. In the near complete darkness she was nothing more than a black smudge slithering up the steel ramp.

She disappeared into the enormous boat’s gaping maw. It swallowed her whole.

***

Isla blinked her eyes open and yawned. She shivered in her secret nook tucked between the boat’s cockpit and storage cabin. Her body felt like it had been doused in liquid nitrogen then thrown under a bus. Funnily enough, spending all day and night outside on a ship’s dank, salt-licked deck didn’t do wonders for a person’s joints. Having done just that for two weeks now, Isla was well-acquainted with the fact.

Her eyes lazily crawled over to the horizon. The weak orange rays of her sunny alarm clock laughed at her from their vantage point far off to the east. They made the wet wooden deck glisten and sparkle. Isla groaned and rubbed her eyes.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m getting up now…” she muttered.

Hissing in pain, she dragged her frozen body upright. Despite her grogginess, she trod as lightly as she could. Every minuscule creak the floorboards made under her seemed to rip her soul in two. Every minuscule creak threatened the end of the plan.

She tiptoed around the outside of the cabin. Although it was so early in the morning, she was never quite sure all of the sailors and fisherman that crawled through the boat during the daytime were asleep. Isla hadn’t been caught yet, but after two weeks she feared her luck would soon run dry.

As Isla made her way towards the stern, the wind picked up, pelting across the ship like a cheetah after its prey. She shuddered as it pounced on her, tearing through her woollen jumper and sinking its icy teeth into her skin.

Hanging into the ocean from the ship’s stern was a huge net made from thick rope. It was slowly being dragged in by a series of large metal cogs. Isla’s dark eyes followed it as it made its leisurely ascent onto the deck. Anxiety flared in her stomach.

This is the last time, she promised herself. We agreed I would do it for two weeks. Today the ship will head into the mainland and Jane and the others will come and pick me up.

The net slumped, bulging, on the deck. Inside was a writhing mass of silver, blue and pale brown. Isla ran forwards and dexterously untied the thick knots that bound it together. Streams of fish spilled out.

Salmon

Snapper.

Tuna. 

Bream.

Too many species to name. They surged from the net like water shooting from a leaking pipe. The odour of seaweed and ammonia was intoxicating. Fish bounced and flopped gracelessly around on the deck like children’s wind-up toys; it was a cruelly funny scene to watch.

Suddenly Isla took a sharp breath in.

“Oh no.”

There’s more of them than usual. Normally there’s about sixty, but… that’s over a hundred. I won’t be able to throw them all back in time. 

Some will die.

The thought knocked the air from her lungs. Failure wasn’t an option.

Frantically, she wrapped her fingers around the slimy body of a wriggling tuna at her feet. She flung it over the boat’s steel railing and was applauded by a small splash! sound from far below.

She grabbed another fish and lobbed it overboard. And another. As many as she could carry. Her arms ached in protest, but she kept going.

You’re going too slow.

Fish flew. Droplets of saltwater rained down. The sound of panting, exhausted breaths filled the air. The young woman ran this way and that, grabbing fish and hurling them airborne. She grabbed another as soon as the last had left her grasp.

Fish, she thought. Throw.

Those words were crudely engraved in her consciousness now, like they were the only fact in the universe that was surely reliable. Who knows, maybe throwing fish was the meaning of life.

Her arms weighed a ton and her legs felt nonexistent. Isla collapsed on the deck and gasped, her body void of energy. She gazed up at the sky.

The sunny orange rays had disappeared. The sky was now a depressing grey, like a bored child had stuffed it with stormy clouds until the atmosphere was bursting at the seams. It thundered and complained, like that same child when it dropped its ice-cream.

What strange weather, Isla thought, letting her mind wander for a second, I wonder if…

“Hello, Miss. Why are you doing that?”

She sat bolt upright. Her heart beat hard. She looked up at him, a short man clad in a blue fishery uniform. All words that she knew expertly weaved between her neurons, teasingly evading her grasp. She cleared her throat.

“Uhhhhh…” was all she managed.

He grimaced slightly and raised an eyebrow.

“In that case, I guess I’ll alert my boss that on my trip to the bathroom block at five-thirty in the morning, I found a strange young woman emptying the fishing net for no apparent reason.”

He turned to leave, but hesitated and turned to catch her eye.

“Please, you’ll get in big trouble for being here. I don’t want to do this to you.”

His voice tugged Isla free from the fog of exhaustion, jolting her awake. She yelped.

“Wait! I… I can explain. It’s… well… I AM a strange young woman emptying fishing nets at five-thirty in the morning, but there is a very good reason.”

She took a deep breath.

“Every fish in the ocean is vital to the marine ecosystem. Each one caught intensifies climate change, pushing planet Earth a small step closer towards plummeting off that lethal cliff and beyond the point of no return.”

Isla paused, feeling tears threaten to ooze from her eyes.

“Sometimes, I swear, humanity is like a poison. We take everything and either destroy it or contort it into something horrible. It’s like we’re determined to wreak as much destruction on the natural world as we do on each other. ”

He gazed at her, eyes wide. His eyebrows levitated up his forehead, and he tilted his head thoughtfully to the side. He glanced around the deck. About twenty fish lay scattered across it, twitching slightly.

“I’m Allan. And I think I’d better help you.”

They knelt down together, grabbing the wet and twitching fish in their hands and letting them soar into the wild ocean.

Allan and Isla carried the last fish together, a huge groper. Between her rattling breaths, Isla saw it thoughtfully studying them through bemused black eyes. They must have looked funny, she thought, two humans stumbling over their own exhausted limbs.

They awkwardly shoved the groper over the railing. As it tumbled towards the ocean, Isla locked eyes with it. When it broke the water’s surface, unleashing a plume of white foam, those dark eyes scintillated with delight.

“Go fish!” Allan sang in his deep voice, “Be free!”

He beamed at Isla and she grinned back.

As they sat together on the deck, despite the drizzling rain, Isla felt lighter than she had in a long time. She leant into his warm presence and clutched his hand in hers, thinking.

Maybe humanity wasn’t really a poison.

It was more like a chunky soup. There were chunks of good, chunks of bad, and chunks of nothing much at all.

You never knew what you would get.