"Fishing" by Jesse Strauss

Up the worms came, rotini-thick, chubby palindromes of flesh.

“Sorry,” I said.

“That’s OK,” said the dirt-specked brain at the bottom of the can. “You need this more than us.”

I could blame the family business but the truth was I wanted it. I would’ve licked glass for a tin can, an old boot—the smallest tug of resistance would cure my everything.

Instead: limp nothing. It wasn’t the ocean’s fault—on the other side of the dock, my sister Maude reeled in cascades of wriggling chrome.

“My lucky day,” Maude said every day, shame never arriving.

“Beauty,” I said. The word a gaff in my throat. “Beauty.”

After, we’d clean her catch on the lawn and listen to the men chat: Thomas her boyfriend, the Harbormaster our father. Paper dolls on the same chain. One day they’d fold into one another, become the same person. We’d be married by then, Thomas and I.

I threw a firework of guts back into the sea.

The Harbormaster would be dead.

<°)))<

The day after a storm the water went freakish clear. I saw Thomas wrestling a disco ball under the dock. He reached in. Put a fish on Maude’s hook.

I saw. Maude saw I saw, went berserk—I had ruined her reputation! Was a liar! Shriveled! Ugly plus jealous!

I had said nothing. I would’ve let it go.

She ran wailing down the dock, worm-ball in each hand. “My own sister!” Her swan dive was perfect.

“Thank god that’s over,” Thomas said. “I’m an honest man.” He hated what Maude had made him. There he was: landed and de-hooked, swimming around in his little plastic bucket.

We wrote our own vows. His said we met on the beach, joked re: many fish in the sea, helmed back to the correct level of sap. Comfortable and sticky enough, his sap.

“I would die for you.”

I didn’t need that or anything else. That was the problem. A problem.

Long ago Maude had told me you had to give men like him assignments that chewed them up from the inside, else they’d turn your life into a factory that made sawdust, quesadillas, and chaw. Clumping and clumping till there was no room for you.

She was right (of course) (damn her), and I found myself living in a rec room in a home for wayward boys. Schlock-spangled and sticky, windowless as the IKEA maze. Strangers kept walking through this situation too, opening the drawers and ogling. Looking for secrets that weren’t there.

Every morning he made me take a tater tot-sized vitamin then take a picture of his bald spot. Sex, sure, but only during herring runs.

“Ahoy,” he’d say, rubbing in the doorway. I’d go to the closet and lay the hats on the bed.

>)))°>

“Cod, please,” Thomas said.

It’d been years. Too busy oiling the foosball tables. “Sure.”

What if…what if…what if…

My rod was rust; the dock one big splinter. I caught nothing.

The Harbormaster watched, a humanoid patch of sea foam made vague by illness. But his eyes were till whetted. What did you think would happen?

I know! I get it! I didn’t really want to! Cod!?

Maude splashed me through an eyelet in the dock. She had become a mermaid—kelp hair, pearlescent tail, the works. “I cheated at fishing to find my own inner shimmering. I was in a dark place. Sorry you were hurt.”

“I wasn’t.”

She swam mackerel-handed to my hook.

“No.”

Her face was slippery bemusement, salted pity. She offered to ensorcell me into a mermaid. Hell no—she’d make me fish-on-top one.

“There’s metamorphosis in the mer-mythos? I thought that was selkies.”

“Unbelievable. Who you gonna trust? ‘The mythos’ or your clam-bra wearing sister under the pier? This has always been your issue. You don’t give a shit about family.”

<°)))<

“How’s papa?” Maude says through the eyelet.

“Died last night.”

“I can’t.” Impossible to tell if a mermaid is crying for real.

The Harbormaster’s stuff is already out on the lawn; wide men pull up with a truck of our kitsch. “Careful with the waterbed,” says Thomas. “New science suggests the undulation aids conception.” He shares promising data sets with the wide men.

I row the Harbormaster out for burial at sea: a heave-ho into the deep, a eulogy, though he always hated words and me. His eyes are rime, echoing the fog unspooling fast across the water. He is really, really dead.

Who should I make him in my valediction?

A) A stumble-drunk buffoon, slipping on eels that slither out his boots as he walks me down the aisle.

B) A hag-cursed wretch, doomed sentinel of a mysterious border place, keeper of old ways.

C) A cruel old salt, a shipwreck-person unable to live up to the archaic beauty of his title. Great sweaters but a real bastard.

I told you not to marry him, cloud-eyes say.

True.

This fucker. This D) All-of-the-above asshole.

He gets the old heave-ho that second. His eulogy is me beating his body’s islet with an oar till it sinks. I scream, heave-ho the oars too.

These doldrums are no different. What did I think would happen?

I cast a line and the fish bite wildly, every strike tightening the corset of my ribcage. When the hook is taken, they leap aboard and die merrily between my boots.

Not really. But imagine? I do. It’s easier in the fog.

I sit in mist, adrift—transfixed by the subtle puncture where my line enters the water, the nylon bridge from me to some alien city. I cast hookless. No worms need die.

When the fog lifts I’m ten yards from shore. The wide men fit the waterbed, a huge floppy prune, through the door no problem. “Would that they all were waterbeds.”

“Wow!” Thomas’ rope slaps the water’s inky glass. “Lucky! We almost lost you too, babe.”

I land myself on the empty lawn.

“Get this stupid shit out of my house.”

Jesse lives and writes in Brooklyn. He has previously had work published in Moon City Review.