fish hooks

she remembers how to gut a fish. she remembers jiggling the knife around to spike the brain. she remembers that this is the most humane way to kill a fish. she remembers the salt and the smoke and the jagged crosshatching on her dad’s hands where barbed hooks went in sharp and came out bloody. she remembers sliding her knife into the fish's belly and slicing in 1.3 cm intervals up to

the mouth and peeling apart skin and pinching at organs and running her thumb along smooth white-pink flesh.

that’s what she looks like, she thinks. pink and white and raw and exposed in the blue polyblend swimsuit she bought on sale at Walmart, and her skin is peaked with goose pimples, like she is growing feathers but not scales. the locker room light is low and gray, and the fluorescent tube overhead is buzzing buzzing buzzing.

her skin is dry. not wet. she didn't get in the pool. she can’t swim. she didn’t get in the pool. she can’t get in the pool. she can’t swim. she can’t get in the pool. she doesn’t remember how.

“I used to be a swimmer,” she tells the woman next to her. the woman is wearing a velour tracksuit. she is humming. “a good one. the best. I was a mermaid.”

the woman does not respond. she has headphones in. she’s listening to music. she is humming along. she is humming and the light is buzzing. the room is sharp with chlorine. it stings.

“in Little Springs. at the pier. you know the one? with the Ferris wheel? they had mermaids, too. behind the tilt-a-whirl. and I was one of them. in high school.”

the woman takes out one earbud. “I’m sorry. did you say something?”

she doesn’t answer. she pulls on sweatpants and crunches her keys between her fingers and leaves.

it is cold outside, cool September, and she likes the smell of cigarette smoke curling away from the man sauntering across the parking lot. she likes the feel of the dry, cracked leather under her bare shoulders, and she likes the way her swimsuit sticks to the seat. it reminds her of summer, and taking her sister for ice cream, and driving herself home from the pier in her dad’s oranged out pickup truck, and losing her virginity.

she clicks her seatbelt into place and checks her phone. she has two missed calls. she ignores them. she turns her key in the ignition.

on the highway, everything blurs and a man on the radio wins free tickets to see a Mick Jagger impersonator at a casino upstate. she changes the station. a tinny harmonica filters through the speakers and Tom Petty sings about summer. it’s what her dad would have called a bluefish sky, white and white and gray and a hint of blue you can only catch out of the corner of your eye if you look quickly and don’t blink. on those days, bluefish days, her dad sat on the dock and smoked and rubbed the tin-plated copper ferrules of his favorite fish pole with paraffin wax and

stared out at the ocean. he never said anything, but it was always understood that she was meant to take his keys out of the wooden dish by the door and drive her sister for ice cream, even though she didn’t really want ice cream and also she had homework to do. by the time they came back, he would be in the kitchen whistling and smiling and making pan-fried mackerel and anadama bread, and they would all pretend it hadn’t happened, her sister dizzy with sugar and herself with the memory of the boy behind the counter with the soft brown curls who’d recognized her from her job at the pier where she worked as a mermaid.

“you’re the one with the red tail,” he said, and she smiled because that was true and because she liked the way his mouth curved when he talked. and then her sister cried because her shoe was untied or her ice cream was melting and the moment was gone.

a light flashes to life on her dashboard. she doesn’t know what it means. she ignores it. the radio sizzles. take me as I come ‘cause I can’t stay long. the light starts to blink. she pulls over. she takes out her phone. three more missed calls. she puts the phone away and climbs out of the car even though she doesn’t even know how to pop the hood of her four-door hatchback, much less how to do anything useful. she leans against the metal slats of the traffic barrier and takes a deep breath. she can taste the water, the ocean, the waves crashing against the shore less than a mile from the road. she knows this place, this stretch of coast. it’s a place she associates with bonfires and discarded beer cans and condom wrappers buried in the sand. it’s a place she associates with sirens.

she gets back in the car and turns her key in the ignition. nothing happens. she turns it again. the engine turns over with a dry squeal and gray smoke hisses out from under the hood.

“fuck.”

she digs her old triple-A card out of the glovebox and dials. there’s a pile-up on the interstate outside of the city, so there are no trucks available. they say they’ll send someone her way as soon as they can. she gets out of the car again and kicks the front tire. the headlights glare at her. she wishes she knew how cars worked. she doesn’t. she does, however, know how mermaids work.

it’s a hose, built into the side of the tank, run back to an air compressor. the technology was developed by an ex-navy SEAL in 1946. every day, when she arrived at the pier, she climbed down to the staff locker room and changed into neoprene compression shorts and an iridescent bikini top with hard underwire and thick padding. she dusted her legs with baby powder and lined her lips with expensive waterproof gel she had to buy herself. her hair stayed loose. she pulled her tail, the red one, out of its locker and carried it up to the edge of the tank, where she rolled it over her feet and up to her hips, grabbed the end of the 163-foot hose, and slid into the water. she could hold her breath for three straight minutes on a good day, sometimes more. once, the boy from the ice cream shop, the one with the soft lips and curls, came to her show and pressed his hands up against the tank as she swam. his breath condensed on the window and in the fog, he wrote call me?, and he left a scrap of notebook paper with his number with a friend of

hers who sold popcorn across the way. her sister liked to come to the shows too, eyes wide, sticky fingers clinging to the tank as though she actually believed in magic.

her phone rings. she hopes it’s triple-A. it’s not. she sends it to voicemail. then she deletes the voicemail without listening. she takes her phone and her keys and climbs over the traffic barrier and walks toward the beach. after a while, she takes off her shoes and lets the shale crunch between her toes. she finds three cigarette butts, an empty Powerade bottle, and a handful of bottlecaps from a local IPA. her phone rings. it’s an unknown number.

“hello?”

“hi, this is Angie with Elk Valley Specialty Care Center. we’ve been trying to reach you regarding—”

she hangs up. she sets her cellphone and her shoes and her keys on a swell of rock and picks her way towards the water. somewhere, a gull cries, and the briny air burns her eyes. there’s a dark smear on the horizon; a ship, maybe, or a whale. the water nips at her bare toes and she remembers what it feels like to swim. she remembers the last time she swam. she remembers the glow of her white t-shirt abandoned on the rocks and the feel of the boy’s wet curls twisted in her fingers. she picks up a rock and hurls it as hard as she can, as far as she can. it crashes into the water, and it sinks. the jagged stones of the beach have made a hundred tiny cuts on the soles of her feet, and the saltwater stings as it licks them clean.

she called the boy back as soon as she got home. they talked the whole night long. they talked about school and sisters and chores and the water and stars, and she found herself taking her sister to the ice cream shop even on easy days when the skies were bright and clear. but it was a bluefish day, slowly fading into a gray-black night, when he handed her the change for her sister’s cotton candy ice cream cone and told her that his friends were having a bonfire on the beach and that he’d pick her up at eight. when she got home, her dad was not in the kitchen, and there was a note on counter saying that he’d be back late, that there were leftovers in the fridge, and that she should make sure her sister got to bed on time. she set her sister up in front of the TV with a Tupperware of lukewarm lasagna and went upstairs to brush her teeth. her sister wanted to go swimming. her sister wanted to play dolls. her sister threatened to tell dad. but when she heard the boy’s car rattle into the drive, she felt a newly familiar blush spread through her thighs as she slammed the screen door behind her. she felt no regrets. he held her hand over the gearshift and circled his thumb over and over her knuckles until they got to the spot where he pulled over and drew her out of the car and onto the rocks. his friends had cancelled but neither of them cared. when he kissed her, she burned and said she’d race him to the water, and they both ran and laughed and left a breadcrumb trail of t-shirts and cutoff denim behind them.

she’s slept with several men since then. some women too. but something about that moment was different. it hurt, at first, and then it didn’t. she’ll never forget it. she’s tried.

she hears a police car scream past her in a red-blue rush that she can’t see but knows is there. she wonders where it’s going. she thinks about the pile-up on the interstate. she thinks about her dad’s oranged out pickup truck smashed and steaming into the traffic barrier along the highway

less than a mile from the beach. she thinks about lying on the shale in just a t-shirt, holding a boy’s hand and staring at the stars, and hearing the sirens doppler closer and closer and wondering if anyone was hurt and learning that someone was dead.

she’s up to her knees now. she doesn’t remember taking off her sweatpants, but there they are crumpled up along the shore, and the waves scratch at her skin. they said her dad was drunk. they said her dad was looking for her.

she’s up to her waist, the water clawing through her belly and deeper. she knows she ought to return to shore. she knows she ought to wait for the tow truck. she knows she ought to call the care center back, but she doesn’t know if she can. she thinks about standing on the beach at her first high school party and tapping the side of the beer can with her shoe so it would crush down flat. she thinks about the pickup truck and the gaping hole smashed through the front window and the fact that her dad never wore his seatbelt. she thinks about the long-term care facility. She thinks about what her dad was coming to tell her.

the thing about the water is that it’s unpredictable. inconsistent. you can’t tame it. you have to learn it. study it. determine which places are safe and which places will kill you. for example, the water off the shale beach stayed warm and calm all summer long. the water on the other side of the bay, off the dock by her dad’s house, that water was different—all bitter cold and tangled up undertow.

liver failure. that’s what the people from the care center told her. an ironic diagnosis for the half dead daughter of a full-dead alcoholic. might be fatal. might not. hard to say at this point. they’d have to run some tests. either way it was only a matter of time. it always had been. that was last

week. that was when she stopped answering her phone. that was when she went to Walmart to buy herself a swimsuit. this swimsuit. the water is up to her shoulders.

while she and the boy from the ice cream shop were holding hands and singing to the radio, her sister was creeping out the backdoor. her sister was slipping into the water. her sister had wanted to go swimming. her dad arrived home twenty minutes later, breath curdled with beer, and found his youngest child bobbing face down in the algae along the shore. the paramedics said they’d do their best, but she wasn’t breathing. she’d been in the water so long. she’d drowned. her dad got in the car. he needed to find her. he needed her.

the water on that side of the bay was dangerous and capricious but it was also cold, colder than water on the shale beach or in the mermaid tanks or off the coast of the pier. the cold helps. it slows the body down. it saves oxygen. her sister was resuscitated 45 minutes after she drowned. after that, she was in a coma for 16 days. after that, she was transferred to a long term care facility. after that, she was never the same. hypoxic brain injury, they said, and all sorts of concurrent diagnoses and complications and tests and long-term care and liver failure and for a while their aunt came down from upstate to help handle it all but eventually the aunt left to start a family of her own and to forget about the sad one she was leaving behind.

the water kisses her lower lip, and she stretches up to her toes to keep the salt water from flooding her mouth and lungs. she imagines what it would be like to stay here, to never go back, to never pick up the phone, to never have to look at her sister again, to never have to remember. she imagines pulling her sweatpants back on, one leg after another, and filling the pockets with rocks from the beach and walking and walking and walking until her legs melted red together and her throat split into fleshy, gashed-open gills, and she was finally, finally free.

she does not do this.

instead, she closes her eyes. she returns to shore. she tugs her sweatpants over her dripping, goose-flesh legs and she collects her phone and her shoes and her keys. she walks back to the road and climbs over the traffic barrier and checks her phone. the gravel of the shoulder crumbles between her toes. she unlocks the car. she gets inside. she sits and inhales and feels the leather hug her shoulders tight. she exhales. she waits for the tow truck. she checks her phone.