Slipper
"Slipper" is what you call whatever just brushed your leg in open water and was gone before you got a look at it. Like flapper covers any bird too fast to name, slipper covers any fish the same way -- not a species, a category, the word Hellsborough reaches for when the specific isn't available.
Most of what gets called a slipper is exactly as harmless as an unidentified fish should be. Some of it is a rainbowslid. Some of it is something worse using the same word as cover, and the honest answer is that nobody standing in the water at the time can tell the difference until it's already decided which one it's going to be.
What I've collected, from years of asking people what a slipper felt like rather than looked like, is more consistent than the sightings: cold, fast, gone, and a texture "like a bar of soap with a temper on it" -- three separate people gave me that exact phrase, unprompted, years apart, which tells me something's going on beneath the naming even if I can't say what.
I've stopped asking waders to identify what brushed them and started asking whether it felt like it was investigating or leaving. The answer matters more than the species ever would.
Field note: if something brushes your leg in open water and lingers rather than bolting, get out. A slipper that's curious is a slipper that's deciding.
| Type | Blinker |
| HP | 1 |
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