The Fish
2019-2020
by: Brianna Murphy The bucket and wooden fishing pole are picked up from the scuffed cedar flooring where they are stored habitually after hours in the brief sun, where the uneven planks are tripped over by a steel fleur-de-lis on the toe of a size eleven boot, where mucoprotein mixed with bog water, rich soil, and Creeping Jenny pieces erupt from a tossed bucket, soaking the floor, stained. A large plastic bait bag filled with still yellow perch is unfastened, cloudy slime strands cling to the bag’s resealable grooves and create a labyrinth of mucus. A hook enters a perch’s lip, cracking like a thirteenyear-old girl’s first cartilage piercing done at Claire’s, and is tossed into the murky water. After three firm tugs, the line breeches the surface and reveals a stout erythrocyte colored creature. It has no eyeballs, but large oval shaped orbital cavities where two thin, black, tubular eye stalks move like the smell of roast beef in the oven, like a speech impediment. Its dime-sized mouth whistles in E Minor when wind blows in its direction, and its tongue, corkscrewed and seemingly endless, grabs for the hands that hold it. Upon further examination, it has no distal appendages, only a muscular fanned tail. Its skin has no scales, rather a
layer of simple squamous epithelium with translucent velvet vellus hairs and steatocystomas. A sagittal crest lines its dorsal cavity, but unlike crested panfish whose barbs can be relaxed by a smoothing palm, touch disintegrates the crest. It coagulates like spun sugar, falls onto the dock, and leaves raspy necrosis. After asphyxiation, a reverse pneumothorax, the creature is placed on a plastic cutting board. A transverse incision breaks past tough, white stroma, the spider web fascia of the liver, down to the atlas, massaging the limen, cutting off the head. There is no blood. A medial slice down the body opens the striated muscles like venetian blinds, revealing a still beating conchae heart. Further down, a red congealed mass sits in the iliac pocket. It does not move by prodding with a one-inch blade, scratching with dirty fingernails, or tapping with a ballpeen hammer, only gravity. The granular lump plops onto the wooden dock in the shape of a helminth that has only feasted on the tapioca beads at the bottom of bubble tea. It turns one of its pointed ends toward its freer as it spreads its matter into a fetid smile full of crooked teeth corrected by metal braces, gives a thumbs up, and slides into the water.
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