r.kv.r.y quarterly literary journal summer 06 fiction
MULTICOLORED TUNNELED LIFE - 3 -
“They love crayfish,” Hank says, sawing through the flesh behind a ventral fin. The small
armature of flexible bones crunches beneath the knife. “At least his last meal was a
happy one.”
“Hers,” Sylvie says.
“Hmmm?” Hank looks up from the fish, confused. “Oh yeah, hers,” he says and smiles.
Sylvie has always loved Hank’s smile. It’s a movie star smile, even though Hank never
gives his teeth a second thought. Good teeth were just one more thing that came
naturally to Hank. Sylvie had dreams where rooms of children smiled towards her, all
wearing Hank’s radiant grin.
She picks up the head of the fish and gently removes the metal clip, sliding it past the
pink feathered gills soft as rose petals. They spread and fan, choking on air that doesn’t
satisfy, air that goes nowhere. She strokes the silk-skinned jaw and slips the end of her
pinkie inside the mouth, running it along a small spur of teeth.
“There’s a lot of blood in the head,” Hank says, “but not much anywhere else.” Sylvie
sees this. It’s thick and dark red, stringy and disappointing like the menstrual blood that
mocks her every month.
After Luke died it became even more important for Sylvie to have children, as if she hadn’
t wanted them enough before. But losing a brother who was nineteen to liver failure?
And he the last male to carry on the family name? Well it left her with a weighty
emptiness, a whistling black void. And Sylvie longed to fill it. But her body refused. Or
pretended to comply only to switch teams just when she thought she was home free. So
hard to explain, these emotions of hers.
First and foremost, there was the question of fault. Whose systems have let us down?
Initially the doctors called it a simple failure to conceive. Then, when Sylvie conceived
and lost, it became failure to sustain a pregnancy. And finally, after far too many losses
and subsequent invasive probings, it was labeled a possible incompetent cervix. Sylvie
did her sit-ups. She took extra folic acid. She stayed bedridden for days. For weeks she
crossed her legs thinking, just stay in. Please stay in.
She was constantly reminded that there were women, women everywhere, who
conceived effortlessly, recklessly. Women dismayed by the little plus sign on the stick,
women who longed for a monthly crimson reassurance. Sylvie was haunted by the
millions of cavalier abortions performed every day to rid these women of their burdens,
when all she wanted was the one.
The worst of all though, was the continuous roller coaster ride of hope and
disappointment, the please, please let me be always followed by the no, no not this
time.
The day the government bought their Love Canal home, Sylvie’s mother fled to Virginia’s
pristine bluegrass hills, taking the children with her. And Sylvie has heard the constant
ticking ever since, the corporeal time bomb that wakes her wide-eyed in the night, her
very own tell-tale heart.
“Should I put it in the water?” Sylvie asks as she cradles the fish’s pointed snout and
rubs her thumb along the smooth skin below the eye.
“No, I’ll bury it in the dirt when I’m done. Along with the entrails.”
She dips the head in anyway and washes away tiny pebbled bits and pine scrubbings.
The watery marbled eye peers upward at her through the silver surface. Sylvie
shudders. “Can she see without her body if the brain is still attached?”
“Aw honey, don’t worry. It’s just a fish. He can’t feel anything, I promise.” Silver scales
shed like shining raindrops as Hank scrapes from tail to head, sideways with the blade
of his knife.
She, Sylvie thinks. She can’t feel anything.
But Sylvie knows that sometimes it’s the things you can’t see or hear or feel that do the
most damage. Likewise, the things that lull you into life: the place you lay your head at
night, the sound of water flowing through its cycles, the shifting ground beneath your
feet, the air you breathe.
Sylvie sets down the head to pick up the discarded ventral fin. She spreads it open like a
fan. Thin ribs, webbed by a gossamer skin, open beneath her fingers. “It’s a wing,” she
says, watching the veins open and close between her fingers. “Do they fly?”
“Sure,” Hank says, smiling. “Smallmouth are really feisty and just leap right into the air.
That’s why they’re so much fun to catch.” He picks up the head and places the knife
along the jaw, its point resting against the eye, which rotates slightly from the pressure.
“With a Smallmouth the jaw won’t go past the eye. Largemouth bass go back a lot
farther.”
She nods, bringing the fin with its tiny piece of attached flesh to her nose and sniffing.
“It smells sweet.”
“Yeah, baby. Good eatin’. Course, later, your fingers won’t smell so sweet. By this
afternoon they’ll be rank as a fish market.” He lays down the head, flops the fish carcass
over and begins scraping the other side as scales shower the surrounding rock, hit the
surface of the water and float gently downward to lie sparkling along the bottom of the
small pool of water.
He stands then, her husband, and folds up his knife, sliding the cleaned and gutted fish
into a two-handled plastic grocery bag. He picks up the head and entrails in his other
hand and maneuvers across the slippery faces of half-submerged rocks to the trail.
Sylvie carries the rod. Just before they reach the dirt road where they have left the car
Hank takes several steps to the side and drops the head and entrails into the
surrounding weeds.
“I thought you were going to bury it?” she says.
“Yeah, well, it’s been so long since we’ve had rain, the ground’s too hard. It’ll be fine,
honey. Don’t worry. Some animal will come along and eat what’s left of him.”
She watches his back as he pushes through the weeds at the end of the trail. His
outline disappears from view as he steps out into the sunlit clearing.
“What’s left of her,” she says.