"Revision Notes Regarding the Fish in the Water" by Danielle Harms

Revision Notes Regarding the Fish in the river

Danielle Harms I. Plot Revision We thought we knew the river. We never did. Go ahead, dear heart, name the fish that live in the Mississippi. If your mind goes blank with white noise, I will start—carp, crappie, skipjack herring.

That one with the monstrous mouth. See what I mean? How we live with this moving river we barely understand? Take the water below the bridge. What makes it red? I’ll give it a go. I will spin theories for you about the ratio of iron and limestone. I will list every fish in the water to fill the noise of the current. I will draw circles on your back with my fingers. But the truth is I don’t have the words for what happened that day. I don’t have the language to describe the person who descended into the river’s water and who she was to us. I cannot even name her, the legs that jumped, the arms that let go, the ribs that cracked from the force of meeting the water. I have no good words for why, no map for what was lost, no route for returning us to the family that existed before it happened, returns us to the years before this desperation seemed possible. My body won’t bear the words. The circles I draw on your back have become ellipses.

But look—I do have some notes for a revision. If we could stand beside each other on the bridge, we could trace the smokestacks for the sugar factory spiraling into Minneapolis, that city our child shakes in an old snow globe, calls Mini Applesauce, that place

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where you grew up, where your parents still live. We could see a tacklebox balancing on the narrow ledge, half its weight over the water. We could narrate a new story from the third person, with a detail about an angler casting a line into the water, a hook tied to a thread of filament alive with the wind. “There it goes,” an omniscient voice could soothe, “and the current drags it down, down, down.” We could cut the scene where someone wonders, “What on Earth? This cannot be real,” because soon in our version she will stop leaning— “over the edge.

over the edge?

over the edge.”

II. Setting Research We thought we knew the river. We never did. That night I searched the National Bridge Inventory to find it: #2441. I found warnings. An 80-foot sail could scrape the underside of the open spandrel, leave a scar you can only see from below. Even now, right now, a ticker counts each bike and body that moves across this new lane, lets people pass over water.

All day, every day digits realign to memorialize one more, one more, one more. So I suppose our choices for editing here are limited. We cannot escape the details. It is natural that we crave to know what happened before we got the phone call, moment by moment. Did river weeds cling like strings to her legs? Did blood smear like sweat across her shins? When you pull a body from rushing water, do you crawl on your knees in the mud bottom?

Do you say it out loud—

“you lived.

you lived?

you lived.”

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R E V I S ION NO T E S R E G A R DI NG T H E F I S H I N T H E R I V E R

III. Temporal Precision We thought we knew the river. We never did. We were not meant to know its current. We never intended to think about this bridge. Time carries us into the coming day, every day moving with new questions that sound like statements of your dazed breath. What is the open spandrel of a bridge anyway? What does sugar release as smoke? Who found the car the next day? Who paid to get it released from the impound lot? Who called 911?

I swear, last one. You’ve been patient. You’ve earned it. We can move on. But what is that monstrous fish we always look up, with its gasping mouth of teeth? What makes the river bottom shudder like a threat you curl your toes not to touch, would not let any part of your body graze even if the current allowed you time to hold your breath and hang in the water, time to see the fish in the river as they are, to watch them pass through rust ribbons of light. Maybe this moment calls for abstraction. Someone could wonder, “Does a river remake rock bottom into russet clouds of what comes now?

now.

now?

IV. Unreliable Narration We thought we knew the river. We never did. Listen to me now dear heart, sweet pea, honey bunches of oats. Protect your soft spots for what we will learn, for when we hear this for the first time: We got it all wrong. It was never that bridge our child shakes in a snow globe, asks you to fill with more water when the bubble gets too big. It did not happen the way we thought. The version of the story we first heard is a fiction. It turns out the car was left in

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the middle of a highway. The sugar factory was out of sight, the angle all wrong for being able to see the factory’s sweet smoke.

And those people biking and walking and stopping to tip their heads together into a picture? They were not witness to the fall.

They saw nothing the police blotter will mention. They witnessed nothing the true crime maniacs will re-share, where scrolling with panic and pain, we will attempt to piece these details together.

Whoever was on the bridge that day—biking groceries home, baiting a fishing line, leaning over the edge to look for the ripple of fish—they did not witness her near death, as we first thought.

They were not bystanders to a moment that would re-make our family in an endlessly shifting story. They only saw the sun set as the water ran, the air rising from everything below that breathes.

My hand on your back is not moving.

But we didn’t get it all wrong. The river—the river we got right. The water was the very same, the same fish in the current swimming through.

through.

through.