Lake trout are native and widespread throughout North America. Lake trout were originally found in lakes in Alaska, Canada, and the northeastern United States. The lake trout has been introduced into lakes throughout the world. These regions include Europe, South America, and certain areas of Asia. Lake trout only congregate and school during spawning season. Aside from this time of year, the lake trout is a solitary fish.
Two trout—a girl trout and a boy trout—were swimming in a wide arc around a sewage discharge pipe emptying into Lake Michigan. Even though they put a lot of distance between themselves and the sewage, their sensitive gills could still detect a lot of the chemical trace elements in the discharge.
“Someone must be doing their laundry,” the boy trout said. “I can taste the soap.”
“Yes,” the girl trout said. “It’s Gain laundry detergent. Apple-Mango-Tango.”
“I remember that stuff,” the boy trout said. “Gain Joyful Expressions soap. Great name.”
“Yes, but they changed it,” the girl trout said.
“What?” the boy trout asked.
“Yeah,” the girl trout said. “I was eating some mayflies along the shore where one of the Gain marketing women lives. I heard her talking on her phone. They kept the actual chemicals the same, and they kept the Apple-Mango-Tango part of the name. But they dropped the Joyful Expressions part of the name.”
“Why?” the boy trout asked.
The girl trout shrugged, a little shiver running the length of her body. “It’s a corporation, you know? A bunch of humans trying to school. Who knows why they do things? Do they even know?”
The boy trout stopped swimming, and the girl trout stopped, too.
“You’d have thought,” the boy trout said, “that they would have kept the Joyful Expressions part and changed the chemicals. Or they would have kept the Joyful Expressions part and changed the flavor name. But of all the things to change, they changed the Joyful Expressions part. That was the only good part.”
The girl trout shrugged again, her lateral line glittering in sunlight that penetrated below the surface.
“Humans are strange,” the girl trout said. “You want to go see if cicadas are falling into the water off the North Shore?”
The boy trout shook his head. When he shook his head, he held his body straight with little motions of his side fins.
“No,” the boy trout said. “In fact, you know, I think I’d like to be alone. It’s been fun hanging out with you, but I think I’m going to head off to deep water for a while.”
“But it’s still summer,” the girl trout said. “The shoreline temperatures haven’t even started to drop—”
But the boy trout just swung his tail in a tight curve, twisted around, and disappeared out toward the middle of the lake.
The girl trout watched the shadowy shape of the boy trout disappear into the deep green distance. She hung suspended in the water, shimmering in the sunlight, alone.
She exhaled a long sigh, and her lateral line glittered again.
The girl trout said, to herself, “What the hell was that about?”
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Gain Joyful Expressions
The End Of The World Shaken Not Stirred
Unrequited As A Cosmology
The Once And Future Mandy Moore
Hello Mark,
Thank you for contacting Gain. Which Gain Joyful Expressions fragrance were you looking for? We do still make Gain Joyful Expressions Apple Mango Tango, but the Joyful Expressions name was dropped and now it is just known as Gain Apple Mango Tango (red bottle).
Thanks for writing.
Brittany
Gain Team
personal correspondence
with the author
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