prompt: fish, title: all is fair in misc. flash fiction

“It’s a fool-proof plan,” she told her, “it’s a fool-proof plan and you know it. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.” Her sister looked at her askance, a brief silence punctuated by rifle exchanges and rocket explosions in the far distance. “Literally?” she finally asked. “Okay, the shooting is literal, sure, but the fish and the barrel are both metaphorical.” “That fish is my husband and the barrel is this goddamned war?” “I mean, yes,” her sister replied, with a hint of guilt but only just a little bit, “it’s literally shooting your husband during the war but that’s still a really good plan.”

They had found out that her husband was cheating just before the war started, the pictures of him with his boss at the office, passed along discreetly by the H.R. person who’d been paid off to not report it internally but still had the conscience to secretly notify the wife. She hadn’t known what to do, she was still in a partial denial when she told her closest confidant, her sister, who tried to help her figure out what to do. The very next day, the bombs started falling, the invasion began, the whole thing a great double heart-punch to her and her sister as well. Sadness turning into an anger, anger turning into awful ideas.

How hard would it be, though, to buy a weapon taken from the body of an invaders? How hard would it be to kill her husband in the middle of a warzone with that weapon and let the chaos be their cover? There were so many corpses, there’d be so very many more, no one would ever be able to investigate them all. Just another civilian slain in the heat of madness. The perfect crime, her sister said convincingly, if not quite the perfect set of metaphors.

But before they could start to put the scheme into action, in the distance, they heard a sound. Or rather, they heard the absence of sounds, a cease in the fire, an end to explosions, they heard the sound of no sounds at all. Soon after, the sounds, the actual sounds of televisions blaring out the news that a powerful ally had joined their forces on the ground, that the enemies were in retreat, that the enemy was suing for peace. The sounds of cheers in every woman man and child in the city, cheers that the tide of war had turned. They’d have their homes back and they’d be able to rebuild their lives back, eventually, to more or less as they were before the conflict.

Everyone, of course, but the two sisters. For them, their plans had met with their enemy and was, as the old sages all said, obliterated upon contact. They might have to deal with this all humanely after all. No more fog of war to cover sins and counter-sins. Just imperfect people living through imperfect times, as we all are, in this war called “Being Alive”.