desire lives under my fingernails and i can never wash her out no matter how hot, how soapy she always whispers: you've been digging. and with the worm hearts and all the seeds i am filled with evidence, desire as: dirty girl. or we could talk about the canines never sawed down, the bird bones and elephant muscle, a gorging of meat, the licking of paws, desire as: monstrosity.
My father splits a dead bream with a long line that zips and zags over the gray belly. He hands me his gutting knife and says to remove each pink coil, as it slowly pops through the incision.
"Just stick the blade in and twist," he says.
"That's all?" I say.
He nods and puts a hand on the Styrofoam cooler to my left. Some of the more resilient fish my father snagged still jumble inside and try to tip the container, like doing so will free them from our make-shift death row and back into Lake Jocassee.
"And if I screw up?" I say.
"It's just perch," he says.
I insert the steel blade, and my father watches as the bream's body empties onto the cleaning table where, after several fish, a small pile has formed. Nervous, I mimic the same motions I've seen him perform for years.
Every Sunday of my life he's walked miles down our road, carrying nothing but a hand-net. His goal, to stay several hours at the nearest pier. When mother lived with us, she and I would wait on the porch for my father to return, sunset enrapturing him and a Lifoam icebox he carried, less than a third of the way full.
Mother always shook her head and said, "There ain't a chance he caught something with just that net again."
But each time, he'd stand in our backyard until the moon rose, while he scaled and filleted each fish and threw its remaining organs to the neighbor's dog. Mother would watch from behind a kitchen window. She'd see him take tan strips of flesh and rinse them under a hose before he threw the pieces into a Ziploc bag for later. When her patience waned, mother would open the glass.
"Come to bed," she'd say.
"When all the fish are cleaned," he'd say.
My father would walk inside an hour later and kiss me goodnight, his eyes full with tears. I didn't know, then, that he caught less fish than he said. Or that his staying up all night and days spent alone were because of something else. Nothing occurred to me until mother rented a U-Haul on my thirteenth birthday and loaded her things inside, a month before she filed the divorce. She came to absolutely loathe my father's fish.
“My father would walk inside an hour later and kiss me goodnight, his eyes full with tears. I didn’t know, then, that he caught less fish than he said.”
Sometimes, mother would take his bags from the freezer and beat every icy fillet with a spoon. Others, she'd spit on my father's plate when he left the dinner table for the bathroom. She thought he saw the fish as an alternative to her, that my father would rather cover himself in blood and innards. I imagine these moments, now, as he shows me the way to remove sheets of the bream's feathery flesh.
"That's it," my father says. "I think you've got the gist."
I finish the one fish, and he washes the meat with the garden hose. My father finishes, bags the fillet, and walks to the cooler, where the other bream have begun to surrender. I can hear their desperate thumps less and less.
"A live one?" I say.
I watch as he opens the top and tries to grab the larger of the few fish remaining, its back fins unfolded into small needles. My father forces a finger in the bream's mouth and pins the fish to the cutting-board. The silver body presses against his skin. It stares into the sun and the glare of my father's blade as he fits the rubber grip into his free hand.
"When they act like this," he says, bringing the knife down just below the gills, "all you have to do is chop off the head."
Henry and Pauletta Glenn’s home was dressed in palm fronds for Easter. They were still green, accenting the white manor house as a beach getaway more than a moderately rustic estate. Everything under Henry’s neglect and the meticulous administration of Pauletta would never look settled. In their living room, coffee table books were serried across ottomans, poised to read themselves to whoever sat before them. Unsettled victorian couches that didn’t fit either owner’s taste stood in squat dignity.
The couple sat in the kitchen and began their breakfast play. “I knew there wasn’t enough available over the counter, but the pharmacist told me this should hold you until next Tuesday,” said Pauletta, in nonchalant confidence. “Dr. Astor will fill the rest of the script then.” Her words cut with a transatlantic formality softened by the passage of time and fashion. They crested over the silence that usually filled their home and squarely landed in her husband’s right ear, which was often turned to her.
Henry’s breath strained at her update. He had left the script his doctor gave him over a week ago in his nightstand drawer.
“How did you know I needed my prescription filled?” he asked.
“Because I’m the only one that tries to keep tabs on your health. You’d be tawny and death-choked without me.” She offered him phrases that didn’t exist. He used to love them, sounding mischievous from of her posh, Anglo bat-face.
He chuckled, then spoke dryly. “Surely you know I want to live.”
“She offered him phrases that didn’t exist. He used to love them, sounding mischievous from of her posh, Anglo bat-face.”
“Want has nothing to do with it,” said Pauletta. “You wait, and wait, then lose track of yourself. The difference between life and death is knowing how to use a date book.”
Henry turned to her. “Paulie, you don’t—“
“I don’t need to lie. Let’s just make this easier, shall we?” said Pauletta, staring at Henry with judicious practicality, slightly drooped cheekbones, and feigned weariness.
Let’s make this easier. It was an expression that knew exactly how vague it needed to be. Henry often resigned to these statements, sobered to the reality of their relationship: sympathetic caretaker and glorified toddler swaddled in far too much Brooks Brothers. They knew each other so well, a realization that despite their mutual lack of tenderness brought Henry comfort and love. He couldn’t articulate their roles and how he felt about them. They never allowed each other time: the elusive, frittering theme of their conversations. He found a second comfort in this failure; soft tones and dodgy words were their remaining mysteries, a vague promise to speak more, if only later.
“You’re not supposed to know the secret. Anyone that has a secret to tell you is a liar,” he half-mumbled over his oatmeal.
Pauletta paused to consider this. “You’re right, dear. So, let’s leave it at that,” she said, concerned but unconvinced.
“But I don’t want the last word…”
She left him talking and went to wash her face. He took his oatmeal into his hands and wandered the halls of his home.
His candy stripe oxford should have been slim-fit, not custom for the body he didn’t have. The floors were never stained right and they should have been walnut. The beach down the road should, through the grace of the fringe amalgamation of best wishes he’d usually reserve for likable children, but could also have passed for the god he didn’t believe in, should shift and face another, warmer sea. Henry felt the vibrational psyche-out that would accompany intrusion on another’s home. As he walked past his living room, it flashed its sconces and scowled him away.
Henry finished eating in his study. In a shadow box against against the room’s southern window was his great-grandfather’s liccasapuni, Sicilian soap-licker, a long stiletto knife from the old country used to forgotten ends. He took it out and proceeded to forage for memories in its worn handle and brown-splotched blade. It was honed steel and leather, an easy target for thoughts of old battles and that electric moment when a deal went south. He liked to think he was smart enough to just flirt with such nostalgia, lightly flicking his wrist with the blade confidently gripped in his hand. But flirtation bites hard in its intent of carelessness. The decorative palms rustled with his awkward swishes, and his chin began to itch. Henry looked outside through the window, which knocked open from avuncular punches of gust spreading a new drizzle eastward. His little show to no one eased his crisis; he began to savor crisp gulps of the ocean air with less apprehensive lungs. He left the room, self-satisfied as a noble, and marched towards the bathroom to find his wife.
She was mid-motion, face cupped in her hands and body uncharacteristically hunched over the faucet, slightly crumpled as if she had been working 10 acres with a soup ladle. Pauletta’s arms shined and revealed unfamiliar cracks in the amber light of their provincial washroom. Her hair, forever auburn and straight, was blacker and frayed in a singed zephyr around her head. She stood up straight, gripped the edges of the basin and turned to Henry. He thought her eyes, at least, should have had the decency to look recognizable. It had to be her, except her nose tipped downward, its bridge higher, deeply ridged and slightly curved right. Her cheeks further drooped and widened from breakfast, and made her face a teardrop. She gasped at Henry and ran out of the room, eyes shut in unmanageable embarrassment.
Henry followed after her, dashing down the hall and into the living room, where Pauletta escaped through porch doors. The trail leading away from their home to the beach lost itself in the rain, which smacked down the dune weeds and raised starry Pepagnaea and gaping Viola Ucriana in their stead. The Norway Maples on his property cracked echoes and stretched upward, their leaves splintering into needles as their stumps summoned flares of Egyptian Lavender. Henry’s scalp now roiled in irritation, his hair sliding wet and matted over his temples. Earth and its servants groaned as they tempered their new knotty blemishes.
Henry halted at the foot of the beach. The foreign overgrowth stopped behind him, though its momentum seemed to billow past and make dwarven gales across the sand. Pauletta stood ahead of him at the shore, hesitantly tracing her hands over the wind as she scanned the coast. Her straining expressions seemed to command the wind, dancing off her eyelashes and circling her wrists. He stood there panting, his head further enflamed as stubble rapidly shadowed his face. He caught his breath and the shifting stopped.
Henry finally felt away from himself and saw her. Face in the rain, tear among thousands of wild ones, amber prism of nervous fire. She stood anxiously in their shimmer, with each droplet pelting her dress — a little longer than before — and turning it gold and blue, drenching color across its weaves in cosmic arabesques. She stared back with green and grey eyes, seasick worlds wide open and imbued with sight beyond the shameful outskirts of their little mystery, and realized herself in this other world. She spoke familiar sentiments to her husband in different shapes and tenderness.
“Io guardo amore
Ma e’ riposa solo sopra cerchi tue parole
Io inseguo tu liberamente”
I see love, but it only rests on the circles of your words. I chase you for free.
He knew her phrases, but this a spell that folded the stretch of their lives among the tall corridors of their faultless home into bare intimacy. On his dreamiest terms on his old hidden coast, through his resurrection of her elements, she was his and yet never so fully beyond his best and most selfish intentions. His ball-busting friend was right there, still not mincing her words. Pauletta and Henry heard them again, renewing the vows of unmade separation and perpetual admonishment they sleep spoke through decades together. They sat on the beach and wept, occasionally laughing, chattering warped Sicilianu, all while his beard grew longer and greyed.
“Mom told me they’d look as lost as you do,” said Henry.
“Lovers or women?,” replied Pauletta.
“It was always lovers, not that I knew enough to realize it then,” said Henry.
“You still don’t,” she said, her words outrageously quiet in their crush. “You know I love your mother, but I wouldn’t buy those words for whatever they’re worth, let alone what she’s sold them for. Those are pretty words, Henry, but they have nothing to do me.” said Pauletta, smirking.
“You’re right,” said Henry. “I can’t have this, can I?”
That was his last attempt to speak around her. “You already do,” said Pauletta. If anything, you can’t leave it.”
“Then what?”
“Make the last word, dear.”
They’d have to return home soon, change their clothes, and go to bed. He sat closer, met the zephyr by her ear, and gracefully obeyed.
Still I summon
that single moment
when you stood before me
and spoke a dialect
of silence
that had no such word
as never,
when you stared me
straight on
as the morning burst
around us,
and I swore
I heard the sound
of light.
From the moment he awoke, his mind was erratic. His walk to the subway had become riddled with potholes since the winter ended, but he only ever noticed when they tripped him up momentarily. His body in determined forward motion, his eyes darted aggressively from moving cabs to clacking high heels, through glass pane store fronts and under restaurant awnings, to the tops of children’s shoulders. He rarely ever looked down because that didn’t coincide with the movements his mind was making.
This time last year, he would have been walking to the office, but he no longer had his old job, or any job for that matter. His former boss had tried to keep him on for as long as possible after receiving the news, but he gradually became “unmanageable.” Co-workers complained about finding him in the copier room, organizing the supplies while he muttered to himself about reupholstering the living room chairs, or how to cook a better chicken piccata.
His paperwork piled up, on and around his desk in fragile towers. He would open a folder and start reading, then immediately lose focus. Open a different folder, then another, quickly gloss over terms like “revenue, and “frozen assets.” Words would prompt him to run internet searches for things like the best winter coat, then the best ski resort (he didn’t ski), then images of pine trees. He went on for hours down a misguided mental rabbit hole. Then he got up and walked back to the copier room.
There wasn’t anything that could singularly hold his focus or concern. He moved distracted from task to task with no cognizance of what he was doing, only a dim understanding that he was doing something. By the end of his time there, having accomplished essentially nothing for months, his boss was no longer sympathetic. It didn’t matter what had happened to him. He simply wasn’t working, and it was time for him to go.
The winter after he lost his job, he nearly got himself killed. Unemployed, he spent his time walking about the city. While his physical body treaded the earth, his muddled thoughts instead visualized when he had last seen the Big Dipper, and which books he had lent out but hadn’t gotten back. His eyes were open but they only saw his thoughts, not the red ‘do not walk’ sign, or the green traffic light, or the car that barreled toward him. Much like a drunk driver, his limp, distracted body hit the front of the sedan and rolled up the windshield.
“The ordeal of preparing for the day took close to hours because he couldn’t just do one fucking thing. He couldn’t just brush his teeth, he had to alphabetize the bookshelf, or water the plants.”
Had he been paying any more attention, his body would have seized up, and the tightened muscles around his bones would have broken them upon impact. Had the car been going any faster, it would have completely run him over; he sometimes wished it had. But he rolled off, the car drove away, and he was “fine.” And his incessant internal dialogue immediately resumed. Limping toward the apartment, he wondered what was in the fridge, where his childhood pencil case was, and if the Mariana trench was really all that deep.
Nowadays, he ran late. Always late, but to nowhere in particular except to the next thing, because he was only ever moving toward not not-moving. The ordeal of preparing for the day took close to hours because he couldn’t just do one fucking thing. He couldn’t just brush his teeth, he had to alphabetize the bookshelf, or water the plants. He would dribble toothpaste spit across the house while he futilely multitasked, always eventually forgetting what he was initially doing, and abandoning the wet toothbrush on the radio or the couch. He left the house with a mouthful of white minty foam and precarious stacks of books on the floor.
By the time he arrived at the coffee shop on the corner, it was early afternoon. That was the one semblance of routine he did have, more out of habit than any actual desire to get a morning beverage. When it was his turn at the counter, he audibly fumbled over sizes and flavors, his daily decision making interjected with his running train of thought.
The barista stood with her hand on her hip, her head cocked to the side in annoyance. The customers behind him toe-tapped and huffed. He didn’t notice. He took his drink, and hit the streets. Days came and went, spent frantically pacing around the boroughs. His sense of urgency was uncalled for for someone with nowhere to be.
When he returned home it was always after midnight. The hours spent walking to tire his mind lasted longer and longer. His attempts at exhausting himself began to have no effect on his alertness or stamina. He entered the apartment dejected; but that feeling, like all his thoughts and feelings, was but a brief moment. He saw his messes from the morning and tried cleaning them up; stack the books back on the shelf, clean the spittle off the stereo. Having picked up the toothbrush, he stood upright to head down the hallway to the bathroom, but turned back and went into the kitchen. Instead, he placed the brush on the counter, and started running water to do the dishes.