The Jack-o’-Lantern Fish

Way back in the foothills of southeastern Ohio,
before the river bore its modern shackles of concrete shipping controls,
the creeks ran wild and untamed,
feeding into the great Ohio like veins into a heart.

It was a different world then.
The kind where the trees older,
the nights were darker,
and the fish could go wherever the water called them.

My grandfather was born into that world—
early 1900s, a boy raised not by books or radios,
but by stories, storms, and the of a well-cast line.
He’d swing slow on the porch, one hand gripping the chain,
and just as the sun began to fade he’d say,
“Lemme tell you about the jack-o’-lantern fish…”

“Flat as a skillet,” he’d say,
“round like the moon on a cool fall night.
It had a face—swear on it—that looked like a carved-out lantern.
Holes where there shouldn’t be,
eyes set too wide,
mouth like it forgot how to smile.”

They never caught them often or at all.
but maybe once in a while, when the water was high
and the creeks whispered strange stories.
He never knew what they were,
never gave it a name beyond what the old-timers called it.
But he remembered the weight of it,
how it felt wrong in the hand.
Not evil—just ancient.

Years passed.
He passed.
But his story didn’t and it stuck with me like river mud on my boots—
a half-believed tale from a world that no longer existed.

And then one day,
digging through old books and strange corners of the internet,
I found it.

Freshwater stingrays.

Round. Flat. Elusive.
And yes—sometimes marked with a pattern
that could look, to a boy from 1919,
like a face carved for Halloween.

The jack-o’-lantern fish wasn’t a lie.
It was a memory.
A truth blurred by time,
but still glowing faintly like something
pulled from deep, dark water.

And maybe that’s the thing about stories like his—
they come from a time before everything was dammed up,
when the rivers ran wild
and nothing stood between the past and the present,
between wonder and what we now call “facts.”

These days, the dams keep the water in check.
The fish can’t go where they once went.
And sometimes, neither can we.

We say it’s progress. Order. Safety.
But I wonder—
when did we start believing stillness was better than movement?

Funny how a wall can go up
and after a while, no one remembers what it blocked—
only that it’s always been there.

Maybe the fish forgot where they used to go.
Maybe we do, too.
Or maybe we never knew
because someone else decided long ago
how far we’d be allowed to flow.

And what happens when you live your whole life
inside a current you didn’t choose?

But when he spoke of that fish,
swinging slow on the porch,
with his words looping like the current used to,
I swear I could feel the river trying to break free inside him—
just for a moment.

And that’s all a story really needs.
Just one moment
where something that was blocked
gets to flow again.