Red Herring

In late Spring and early Autumn, on nights when the fog rolls in as thick as soup and every window glows with the soft yellow light of candles long forgotten, that is when people take to the roofs to dangle baited hooks while others stumble through alleys and backstreets swooping make-shift nets or seines through the dim twilight murk in the hopes of snaring a few fog fish.

Midwives and mothers warn their children of the goonch and dogfish, eavespike and a dozen varieties of catfish; all wide-mawed or sharp-toothed and quick to swallow-up the unwary or the unlucky. Especially the very young and the smaller in stature. Old-timers warn of the dangerous sting of carpetfish that tends to linger on after the fog has faded. Every bar and tavern has trophies of particularly gruesome or toothsome specimens stuffed and mounted over their mantles, both as a warning of what might enter a carelessly open window and as a source of bragging rights for those who finally and successfully wrestled the beasts into submission and into a cooking pot, canning jar or skillet.

But of all the biting, stinging, gulping things that flutter and flitter through the swirling, whirling gloomy effluvium the most notorious by far are the Red Herring. Shimmering, shiny little fish with no bite, no sting; they flash and flicker through the haze taunting those that try to capture them. Beguiling and tempting little morsels, they seem to take a will-o-the-wisp's cruel pleasure in evading capture while leading would-be fishers into any and every hole, pit, obstacle or hazard in the immediate vicinity.

Occasionally a school of Red Herring is caught, usually by groups of hungry children who string up multiple seines and nets across several adjacent alleys. They must clear the nets quickly, before the thrashing fish attract too much attention and something else claims the catch. Those that survive the night's dangers dine on the succulent flesh of the rascal fish while they mourn those of their friends who were lost, one set of hunters feeding off of another.

The fish must be eaten quickly, before they evaporate with the fog, though some claim that if you manage to place a still wiggling fog fish under your pillow before going to sleep, you can dine on all the fish you like for so long as you can dream away the rest of the night and in the morning your belly will still be full. Or at least that's the way they tell the tale in the shanty-camps...