I could feel it, yes sir, the warmth of love, of belonging somewhere, of having friends like I’d always dreamed of. Because that had been my wish this whole time. To find a place for myself, to quit being a failure and a mess-up, to take up where my daddy left off. To be a part of a family again. That’s what I’d wanted all along, same as Boss Authority’s Fish Boy.

Boss Authority opened his eyes wide then, the white one gone strange, sort of a churning whirlpool in it, milky and swirling. He turned his head and stared my daddy down, that ponytail of his lifting high like a snake about to strike. A meanness crept back in his voice right then, all grit and thorns.

“And then came the worst night of the Fish Boy’s life,” said Boss Authority. “The night when he learned the true nature of his new friends.”

“Please,” said Pop, his voice a whisper. “Please don’t tell this part. Not in front of my boy.”

“Oh, I fully intend to,” said Boss Authority. “I intend to tell your boy every single word of it.”

“I’m begging you,” said Pop.

That’s when Marina cut in. “You don’t have the right, David. You don’t have the right to tell Bobby Felix what he can and can’t say.” She cast her eyes down to the table. “No matter how bad it hurts.”

Drusilla Fey licked her lips and giggled a little bit, like she was enjoying all this pain and strangeness. I myself had not one clue what was about to happen, what kind of story it was Boss Authority was going to tell. I was pretty sure this had nothing to do with Parsnit though, that it had everything to do with real life, something my daddy had done to Boss long ago.

“See, now this Fish Boy was learning a little something about himself,” said Boss. “He wasn’t any witch, mind you, but he had a spark to his blood, a shiver of magic in his bones. Nothing much, but a little. And that little was the most of anything all his own that he’d ever had. So he cultivated it, he made it grow. He read and he studied, and he learned. It was slow going, sure, book by book, scroll by scroll, herb by herb. In time he realized he had a gift with plants, with making green things sprout and bloom. He could conjure near anything healthy and whole out of the muck of the swamp, make it blossom into a thousand swirling colors, a whole sunset of flowers let loose in his palms. That’s right, his early gift was beauty, this ugly guppy of a Fish Boy, weaker and smaller and tinier than all the rest. He could make pretty things bloom.

“He just wanted to thank her, is all,” said Boss Authority, his voice cracking a little. “He just wanted to make something lovely for her, to thank her for giving him a home, a place, even friends, or what he thought were friends. He could do that much. So he grew her a painting. He planted his seeds and spun his magic, the vines sprouting and looping around a wooden picture frame he’d made, a little trellis on the inside to hold it all together. It took him months, maybe even a year, to get the colors right, to make the plants blossom and bloom just so. But he did it, he grew her a picture, a portrait, and it was beautiful. It looked just like her, the way the light would catch her in the early morning, when the sunrise made the whole swamp new, in the best moments of the day, before anything had happened, when all was still possible. That’s how this Fish Boy grew a present for the Dolly Witch.