Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio M
… the waters inside the monster calmed and I grew hungry. As I gazed up, a delicious morsel, a shiny little anchovy, landed on the surface, floated, then danced in the most enticing way. With a flick of my tail I swam straight for it, opened my jaws as wide as I could, and…
“Ouch, ouch,” I cried, “my lip!” The fishermen had eyes like lamps and hands like fins and penises like trees and they lived on an island inside the whale with a mountain of bones at its center. “Unhook me,” I said. “I’m hardly a meal for men as strong as you. Besides, I’m not even a fish at all!”
The fishermen looked at each other and one said, “Is that you talking or is that the fish?” They carried me to a cave high on the mountain where a disheveled castaway wizard had lived for four hundred years and taught himself how to speak fish. “Great wizard,” I gasped. With every moment that passed it became harder to speak. “Transform me into a bird, please, a brave eagle, possibly, or a bright strong owl, so that I might fly to the city in the clouds where pain never visits and the west wind always blows.”
The wizard laughed. “Even if you grew wings, foolish fish, you could not fly to a place that is not real.”
“Wrong,” I said, “it does exist. Even if you don’t believe in it, I do. Otherwise what’s it all been for?”
“All right,” he said. “Show these fishermen where the big fish live, and I will give you wings.” I flapped my gills in agreement and he mumbled magic words and tossed me into the air, high over the mountain, to the very rim of the leviathan’s gums, where the gory pillars of his tusks sliced the moon…
