Creative Writing: The Dead Fish Society

The Dead Fish Society

It was a dark and stormy day. It the first day of class and Bletchley Boys School - a school rich in tradition, and rich in the traditional sense. I will never forget my first year at that school, for I met a teacher who changed my life forever. His name was John Flounder. He taught poetry - a class that was not exactly the most macho class, but one that was required.

I sat in the classroom of Poetry 101 wondering what I was doing there. I looked around at the 30 other pimply faced boys who sat wondering the same thing. We were rich, we would be successful, and nobody ever needed poetry while holding a board meeting. I would soon change my mind.

He entered the classroom through the

Ralph always knew. "It means 'Seize the Fish!'"

"Yes! Seize the Fish! It means that life is too short to spend your time in school. Go fishing, my boy! Look at the faces in these pictures, " he said as he pointed to one of the many pictures in the display case. "these are young men just like you. Can you hear them calling out ? They are saying 'Carpe Piscus - Seize the Fish.' They stayed in school, wasted their precious moments studying instead of fishing. Life is too short for this. Go Fishing!"

Needless to say, we didn't know what to think. Here was a teacher telling us to ditch school. We decided to investigate this man a little further. George Dingus went to the library and found an old copy of the Bletchley Blotch - our yearbook. We saw the entry for John Flounder. He was a pimply faced little squirt like the rest of us. He was involved in the chess club, the pi-memorization club, and something called the "Dead Fish Society." As hard as we looked, we could find no other mention of the "Dead Fish Society."

Our next day in class turned out to be as interesting as the first.

"Why do men write peotry ?" he asked.

"To express one's feelings ?" suggested Freddy

Flounder about the "Dead Fish Society." He told us that it was a secret society that met in the old cave around midnite to swap fish stories. It was at that moment that we decided to revive the old "Dead Fish Society."

The "Dead Fish Society" soon became our nightly ritual. We would meet at the cave and begin with a short poem, usually beginning with something like "There once was a man from Nantucket." Then the fish stories began. We began to notice an obvious trend - the length of the fish in the stories increased with time. By the end of each meeting, someone was catching a blue whale with a paper clip. It was not these meetings that led to our downfall, it was how we got our inspiration.

"Carpe Piscus" was very real to us. We went fishing as often as we could and usually ditched class to do it. Mr. Flounder changed his philosophy a little and started saying that we should only sieze the fish when we had free time. Unfortunately, we never heard him since we were ditching his class. We ended up flunking all our classes, except Home Economics. We never missed Home Ec since we were allowed to cook our fresh fish. We ended up dubbing the class "Home Ich", a joke that was only funny to greeks and ichthyologists. Our parents were quite perturbed at our grades and demanded an investigation. The "Dead Fish Society" was officially disbanded and our fishing licenses were revoked. But the last thing was the unkindest cut of