The United States of Flying Carp

The stupidest way to get injured.

I slunk into the house, body bloodied and T-shirt torn, failing to go unnoticed. My son looked up from his video game of bedraggled freaks. The real deal had arrived.

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” I muttered, peeling a bandage from my arm. Deep cut shaped like a scythe or a smile, two dark blue steady growing bruises above.

“Bruh Mama,” my son said with concern.

Bruh Mama is my name. It is a Gen Z honorific, like Friar Tuck.

“That’s not nothing. What’d you do?”

“Went to the lake.”

“What happened at the lake?”

“You don’t want to know,” I said. “You’ll lose all respect for me.”

“Um…” he said, firing teenage ellipses like bullets, and I said, “Hey!”

“Respect, Bruh Mama,” my son said solemnly. “I respect you.” Grains of sand fell from my hair like little lost pieces of dignity.

“OK, I’ll tell you,” I said. “A giant flying carp hit me in the face and knocked me half out of my kayak into a fallen tree which trapped me with branches like claws and as soon as I broke loose, the goddamn carp flew back and smacked me again.”

“I’m fine!” I yelled over his laughter. “I got injured in the stupidest way possible. I’m going to have to make something up so I don’t look like a battered wife. If anyone asks, I was in a war. Actually, don’t say that — it’s too plausible.”

I’ve been battling flying carp for years. They are an invasive species. In 2024, five landed in my kayak at once, and I wrestled them out one by one with my bare hands. When I got home, everyone yelled at me to shower. But I felt like a winner. I had kept my balance and navigated enemy terrain. Carp are followers who favor the same spots, and now I would circumvent their sordid schemes.

I was wrong. Carp are loners, like me, who shoot out of the water like cannonballs. I got adept at whacking flying carp with my paddle. I call it Ozarks Polo.

When the drought came, I could spot them slithering from afar, including one I called “The Serpent”, who I was convinced was not a carp but something worse. It was The Serpent who sent me reeling into a toppled tree from the flood after the tornado. Every remnant of climate change was conspiring against me.

I believe in you, already, I thought. You don’t need to remind me on my time off! Everyone prays to the weather so the weather won’t prey on them.

I go to the lake to find the mind I lost. It vanished in May when the tornado hit and remained at the bottom of the water after my daughter left for college. The lake was a bootlegger paradise in the 1920s and that description narrows nothing down: I live in Missouri. When the county dredged the lake, they found a century of guns.

And tattered pieces of battered souls, surrendered to the water, drowned on purpose, invisible to the human eye. Maybe that’s what the carp feed on. Maybe that’s why it came for me.

“You knew damn well I was a Snake before you took me in,” Donald Trump intones in my head. One of a million confessions that savvy men said not to take seriously, but I did.

* * *

An invasive carp became president. He spawned a sea of invasive carp and hired invasive carp to man the Prevention of Invasive Carp Department. He announced his plans on Invasive Carp TV while holding the Project Invasive Carp guide in his fin.

In 2025, the Savvy Man asked, “Who could have seen invasive carp coming?” and chuckled with feigned chagrin. A flying carp smacked the Savvy Man in the face, and he thanked it for Reaching Across the Aisle.

“GONE FISHIN!” say the signs on the Democrats’ doors. The Carp Cabinet threatened to chop Democrats into pieces and use them as chum. The top Democrats smiled and declared this a Gesture of Bipartisanship.

Back in 2024, lines for bait covered the land: Ballot Bait, the best kind, wholesome and fresh, everyone pretending it’s not carp fodder. Act Blue, like an infested lake! Vote Blue no matter who — but drop that paddle; there’s no steering here. Roll with the current, surf the crimson tide; vote blue no matter what — vote blue for genocide! Vote blue when blue is red with blood that won’t subside.

Your phone holds a novel of texts from the Stop Invasive Carp or Everyone Dies Coalition, led by politicians who refuse to stop invasive carp because it’s “too divisive.” They say they need a billion dollars to kill one carp.

“Five dollars, ten dollars, seven-hundred and seventy dollars,” it intones. “Come on, paddler, what do you got to lose?”

Everything, everything, everything, you cry, the lady in the lake.

But is losing the same as getting mugged? Is surrender the same as theft?

You don’t know because you refuse to participate. You’re the Ozarks Polo champion, bruises be damned — damned with the predators looking up at my lake from the hell I believe in for comfort.

* * *

What’s the stupidest way to get injured?

The most American way to get injured is to have an injury for years and ignore it because the bill scares you more than the pain. I am an American Patriot: I kneel to no one because I lost my meniscus to a decade of delaying the doctor.

But the stupidest way to get injured…

Being the head of the FBI and allowing a career criminal to run for president even though you have plenty to charge him with and then countenancing his post-sedition run and being surprised that he indicts you when he knows you know his secrets….well, that is one stupid way to get injured! Trump vs Comey may be kayfabe, but even pro wrestlers get real brain damage.

What’s the stupidest way to get injured? Appease the autocrat after he extorts another elite institution in the belief that now the state will spare yours, not grasping that surrender only whets the appetite of the snake the snobs let in.

What’s the stupidest way to get injured? Use AI technology that not only strip-mines critical thinking and destroys creative fields but also kills the natural environment while enriching the worst people in the world and entrenching your status as “disposable human” while a robot designs your tomb.

What’s the stupidest way to get injured? Follow the pundits and politicians who said every quagmire war was noble and every criminal elite was on the verge of indictment and every obvious crisis was your hysterical imagination and every vulnerable population was an existential threat — and keep believing them, until their slick wormy bodies land their hooks in your brains.

What’s the stupidest way to get injured? Listen to the woman who got smacked by a flying carp write in extended metaphors like she lives in a semi-authoritarian state where the safest communication lies in allusion and allegory and jokes, because you’re not supposed to read her for some reason. The Prevention of Invasive Carp Department say she’s crazy, and you know they never lie.

* * *

The day after The Flying Carp Incident, I returned to the lake. No invasive fish would dam my stream of consciousness.

Float, float, float; float the pain away… but something brought me back to earth. A juvenile little blue heron had appeared the week before, white in its infancy with a black beak. I never saw its parent nearby: grown little blue herons hid in a cluster a mile across the lake. What I did see was The Serpent circling The Juvenile as he perched on a log and pecked at the water, day upon helpless day.

I couldn’t reach The Juvenile. The water was too low. I could only watch as other birds — egrets, ducks, great blue herons — surrounded him. Were they protecting The Juvenile? Or was he more prey?

An egret landed next to The Juvenile. They stared each other down. The egret caught a fish and The Juvenile watched. I paddled away, and when I came back later, The Juvenile had a fish, too, and the egret stood tall beside him.

The stupidest way to get injured is to view everything through cynical wounds and never imagine a more generous world.

I started to paddle to shore but stopped at an unfamiliar shape on a sandbar. It was an invasive carp, its corpse rotted and teeming with maggots. The birds left it alone. They had nests to build and fish to hunt and a whole sky to wander. A serpent, even slain, was not worth their time.

I moved through the water, knowing I brandished both weapon and wound, and that neither was the point of my journey.

* * *

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It’s not over, baby blue. All photos taken by me from a kayak in summer 2025.

Egret.

Adult little blue heron.

Great blue heron greeting the hazy day.