One day, as we were swimming across the floor of the deep, cold ocean, Angy showed me a little, nervy-looking fish that was tightly attached to her skin. He was tiny, even smaller than me, his body a lump of sparkly flesh that automatically triggered my hatred towards this vulnerable creature, although I wouldn't say that my appearance reflects strength like her. I said that I'm happy for her, that she had found her 'male counterpart', and she was so excited about it that I decided to keep my anger for myself. I was jealous that I was not her cutie anymore, not the number-one way I used to be, if she turned all of her attention and care to her new darling who she precioused.

My thoughts ran in a circle, over and over, whether I should tell her. But in the end, I remained silent about the problem, and behaved like the usually cheerful me. I wish I didn't act like that. I wish I could change my end.

Angy never hunted much, she hadn't been through a moment of hunger in her free journeys with me before. Then she just worked and worked, being fused with one more annoying mouth to feed and to burden her everyday, although she had had no experience of the couple's life. She became nightmarishly desperate and went crazy for only a piece of food. As her best friend, I felt bad for her, for I was useless and helpless, upon seeing Angy going wild. She bit everything edible that unluckily swam past her angler. She turned into an animal, of no exception.

I really did want to somehow make her feel better, but it was a situation that I didn't even need to do anything. Angy was not the sister I loved anymore, and one day she would stop wandering around with her Dum-Dum, viewing him as nothing else but a delicious meal. Greasy meat, tasty blood, full size for a decent prey.

It happened fast, as quickly and swiftly I couldn't understand what was going on, it was all my fright when I faced her, the ferocious anglerfish with a faint, terrifying light over her devilish face. I knew all along, her teeth were dangerously sharp, but not until then I realized they were deadly. I knew that she looked ugly and evil, but her vile bloodlust wasn't something she occasionally showed in the witness of me, and honestly I hadn't seen it before.

I was the filler to feed her hungry mouth, to keep her alive temporarily, to help her survive the famine she naively put herself into. I was forced to volunteer and consecrated myself as a tribute. I was hopeless, closing my eyes and letting it go.

Oh, yes, I was a weakling, giving up myself to my greatest fear, but, maybe my worst nightmare wasn't death nor betrayal. It was what that I afraid would come someday: The end of our fragile, pure friendship. We were all weaklings to our fright, Angy and me.

Angy swallowed me in one slap, and unconsciously I felt my limp body floating down her throat, being deformed with acid, and then when I finally became light and soft, I flew to the sky. In the very last of the very last moments, I heard the whisper, soft and tender, as though nursing my eaten corpse, the whisper coming from me, the silent phrase of a lifeless fish questioning its fate.

Dying? Is dying a big deal?

Are we monsters supposed to live, anyway?

No, we were not. From the beginning, everyone, humans, fishes and octopuses, everything was born to die, to be executed at an unknown milestone of time. The only concern was how and why we would be gone.

Somehow, death was a present gifted to the ones who could not anymore bear the scythes awaiting their further journeys. I was devastated by Angy's sudden change, and in a manner of speaking, I was dead long before I was physically enabled from living.

My story had flipped to the last page, that event was just the backmost period in the final sentence, demanding a stiff ending. Death was the ultimate salvation, the gate opened to a place more beautiful and happier than the depths of darkness under the ocean I used to be jailed in. Angy had had no choice of entering that 'gate', so she lived on, in a world painted with the gloom of grief and anger, where surely her life wouldn't be more of a living than mine. She lived on, in the inferno of water.

She lived on in hell.