DDAZZL

on certain mornings

There are mornings — usually in late June, after a night of rain that the garden did not strictly need — when the kitchen window catches the first hour of sun and the water in the glass on the sill turns the exact colour of the inside of a shell. On those mornings the angelfish drifts up from wherever angelfish sleep and settles, for a few minutes, just above the toast.

It is an entirely private event. I have never told anyone. I am telling you now because you have read this far, which means you are, in some quiet way, the kind of person to whom the angelfish would also appear.

— mid-July, by the kettle

The kettle in the corner has begun to tch-tch-tch the way it does just before its serious whistle. The cat, who has no opinions about angelfish, watches a single fly trace eights against the screen door. Nothing else happens, and nothing else needs to.

a letter from the lagoon

My dear, the water this season has been the temperature of forgotten tea. The cardinal tetras you sent last autumn arrived in good health, though three of them have developed a habit of holding still in the patch of light beneath the dock for the better part of any given afternoon — a habit I confess I am beginning to share.

The moorish idol you asked after is in fine humour. She has taken up residence in the shadow of a sunken pail and emerges only at the hour you used to call the blue hour, which here lasts a little longer than it did at home. I think of you when she does.

(the dock at noon)

Write soon. Or do not — the lagoon understands letters that never arrive, having received so many of them.

— ever, the keeper

a botany of small intentions

This site does not sell anything. It does not subscribe you to a newsletter, it does not track which paragraphs you lingered over (though I confess I would like to know), and it does not, under any circumstances, ask you to get started. There is nothing to get started on. You are already in the middle of it.

If you would like to know what DDAZZL is, the most honest answer is: it is a small, slow place where one person is drawing fish and writing about them, and a few other people occasionally read. It is the digital equivalent of leaving a notebook open on a café table and trusting that a stranger might, on the right kind of afternoon, sit down and read a page.

no CTA. truly none.

The angelfish will be along again in a moment. She is always along in a moment.

late, the light

By four in the afternoon the kitchen has gone the colour of the inside of a peach. The cardinal tetras, who were earlier a school, have drifted into separate occupations: two of them inspecting a piece of seagrass with the seriousness of theatre critics, three of them holding the formation that, in fish society, indicates contentment, one of them — there is always one — facing the wrong way entirely.

The angelfish has lowered herself onto the bottom of the page, where she will remain until the moorish idol comes by, which she will, in the footer, below.

she does, she really does