Fiction

I was hacking away at the woody asparagus—no one had planted it, no one ate it; it moved in from the neighbor’s years ago—when hundreds of blades, curved like pointing fingers, began falling from the sky. I dropped my scythe. I crouched. I held onto my sunhat, as if a hat would protect me from a hail of knives. They slapped the grass and flopped onto their flat sides. When I shook my head, they tumbled off my hat’s brim. One slid down my back. I winced, but I wasn’t hurt at all. They were fish, small fish—dead, from what I could tell. Bruised, but not bloody.