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That’s why they got along so famously, why they understood each other so well. The bass fisherman had never suspected that beneath his wife’s perfect demeanor and perfect appearance lay anything beyond a normal human woman’s skeleton. Love existed between them and why question a perfect thing? The woman used to feel the same, but now, approaching the end of a bass’s natural lifespan—and sixteen years of marriage to the man—the woman wondered if maybe she ought to tell him that she was not in fact a woman, at least not a human one. They’d had no children and she was going to die soon. In her human life, she pretended at present to be forty-three, a premature age for human death, she understood. This is it, she thought, I must tell him what I am. She could not die knowing that the man she loved more than she loved herself, the man who loved her deeply and devotedly, did not comprehend the true nature of her being. So, sitting in her chair before a mirror with her human skin unzipped around her, misters blasting to keep her scales wet, the bass fisherman’s wife settled on a plan.
     
     
     
    On the night the bass fisherman returned victorious from the latest tournament, he found the mansion candle-lit, each room bedded in the petals of a different flower. Finally, entering the master bedroom, he heard the shower running in the adjacent bathroom. He understood at once what the wife was wanting, or at least offering, and he stripped out of his sweaty sponsor-issued rags and loped, stiff and hunchbacked from a week sitting in a boat eighteen hours a day, to the shower door.
     
     
     
    “Hell, honey. You never told me you were a bass,” the bass fisherman said.
    The woman breathed a sigh of relief, but she was not out of the woods just yet. Even without her human skin, her husband recognized her. That was the first major, painfully crucial step. Now to explain how—and why—she’d been keeping her identity secret. For sixteen years they’d lived as man and wife. Could they live as man and bass? Surely he’d want to know about her motives. She suspected he’d suspect she was a spy for the bass empire, gleaning information on the secret happenings of bass fishermen everywhere. She suspected a lot of bad things about where this moment would lead and what it would come to, but now that the moment had arrived, she failed to recall the fears and insecurities that’d kept her awake so many nights. Because this was her, standing as a human-sized Florida strain largemouth bass under blossoming pellets of lukewarm water. This was really her.
    Before she had a chance to speak a single word, feeling as if an hour had passed between her husband’s initial response to her unveiling of her true form, to the statement which came next from his stunned lips, the woman felt not only relief, but an entrenchment of their love that exceeded all the previous bonds of their relationship, an already good and healthy one by human standards.
    “Honey,” said the bass fisherman, “there’s something you oughta know.”
    As he said this, he unzipped his human skin, pulling from the crown of his head down over his forehead and lips and neck and heart and even further down, until his skin and clothes and mechanical human limbs fell to the floor. He too fell. The bass fisherman lay before his wife as what he really was: a man-sized earthworm.
    Stripped of all barriers, the bass fisherman wriggled into the shower and awaited the final embrace of his tender, loving wife.





 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Harry Sandini
     
    Harry was diabetic, and on account of his poor health, they’d amputated both his legs, first one and then the other. He looked like a wizard, what with his flowing white mane and white beard, his skeletal frame, and the silk robes that he wore in an effort to hide his stumps. My father and I used to fish every weekend with Harry, but after his second leg was amputated, he refused