In to the Frying Pan

I am owed a catfish. Listen carefully to hear the faintest decibel of gainsay. Do it. Cup your ears and report back to me any rumor short of deservingness. Find me a port or fisherman that is ignorant of my just due. You will wander for the better part of your life. Every single deckhand to the mothers who bore them know that it is my season. No more will my plate be dressed with scant minnows that storks refuse. Daylight makes them glitter and that is the only good thing that can be said of them. Give me a whiskered serpent of anomalous length. Let the townspeople say that an aquatic dragon is made ready against the day of my feast. None should bother with a conventional line and reel. Neither should any parous the selection of bait of which to hook them. Whoever it is that will deliver my fish must have a wild nature. To this end I suggest you fetch an outdoorsman of Southern extraction. He will cut his trousers at the knee and wade in shallow waters to free handle the beast that will take a calendar month to consume. It will not be a task that can be confused with leisure. Such a man will stand for hours having the sun assault his skin and not complain. With pruned fingers he will wrestle a thing that Homer would have supplied through hyperbole. Yet this is not the flourish of an overly zealous pen. Each scale of my catch should be comparable to the signet ring of a Sovereign. I will have it set before me whole. Do not think for a second that I must be spared the reality of what is presented. Leave the head intact and keep the eyes. I want it to stare back at me with an open mouth. Do not sanitize your kill. Be honest in the bloodiness of your trade. My appetite does not come with an apology. Show me the face of that monster, and I will show it the face of an even greater one. Do not salt it. I did not hire a chef, but an assassin. Fish should always be eaten bones in the way God intended. We have tea to drink and wishes to make upon it's pelvis. I am the equal of any bird of prey. So do not gut my prize. I desire the liver and gallbladder. It is a shame that you must put it to an open fire. There is a primitive side of me that would like to expand the scale of what can pass for sushi. If my teeth are not pink, did I really eat? It is my time. The humiliation of patient nibbling is over. Make me a king, and bib me down to the waist. I am owed a catfish.