My Father the Fish

We’re all addicts. Take a man’s television and on any given Sunday he’ll fill your ears with a booze filled racist tirade. Take away a teenager’s phone and you’ll see the same animal. Take a poor man’s last sip of soup or last morsel of hamburger that he scrounged from a McDonald’s dumpster and you’ll find yourself bleeding in an alleyway, teeth marks freckling your arms. Take away a little boy’s XBox and you’ll hear the primal howl of a distressed primate bellowing from his room. Take away an athlete’s legs or a musician’s hands and see how quickly the cemeteries fill up. Take away a banker’s money and you’ll see the cities burn. 

~~~~

The bartender looks at me with the same pity he shows the rest of the regulars. We’re all addicts in his eyes - incapable of going without what our bodies have grown to expect. 

~~~~

“Well, if that’s not the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen,” I told her. 

Lily extended her hand showing me the tooth that had finally given way and lost its fight to gravity. It had held on for months and had even survived apple season. 

The poor tooth sitting alone, I thought. Lily’s eyes darted back and forth from her tooth to me, unsure how to handle the loss. Her first loss. She had always had it, according to her. She had no memory of being a plump little baby jamming plastic chew toys into her mouth to ease the pain of teething. Whenever I told her stories about her as a baby she looked me up and down, doubtful, as if I were making up stories again. While her tooth was still hanging by a thin thread, I tried to tell her that when I was a little girl, long before she was born, I had also lost my teeth. Her response to this story was always, “No.” She would keep the tooth forever, she thought. The gums would regain their grip and everything would soon be back to normal. 

Her cheeks sagged and pulled her eyes to a droop as they do when children are on the verge of crying. 

“Another will grow back in its place,” I told her, wanting to intervene before her emotions overcame her. “It’ll be a bigger and better one!” But the loss was too much for her. 

“I don’t want another one. I was this one!”

~~~~

When I was eight my older brother came rushing into the house screaming to my mother. I didn’t understand a word of what he said - the words were lost in desperation - but I understood the meaning he was meaning to convey. 

My mother and I followed him to the backyard where we saw my father floating face down in the in-ground pool, a portion of his back poking out from under the water, a wad of leaves slowly dispersing from the net that floated beside him. They reminded me of caterpillars crawling from their webbed nest, I remember thinking. Our mother screamed at us to go inside but we stayed put. 

After some time, she sat us down inside as the fire department fished him from the pool. She explained to us that these types of tragedies happen from time to time and that God had some sort of plan that we couldn’t understand, at least not yet. She hugged my brother after hit a wall with a closed fist. 

“He didn’t want to leave us,” she told him. He didn’t listen. He ran to our shared room and slammed the door. He blamed my father for years after that, whispering his hatred from under his blanket, at night, while he thought I was sleeping. 

I would change my breathing pattern, slowing it to a rhythmic metronome, only interrupting it to clear my throat from time to time, or to strategically jerk my leg as if I had been startled by a dream. 

During those nights I noticed that I breathed slower, shallower, but it didn’t affect me. I breathed twice as slow as normal but I was still breathing. It must have been because I wasn’t moving my body, or that I wasn’t using all of my brain. They say that brain activity uses around three hundred calories a day. 

Or maybe it was because that was how I had always breathed at night in order to listen to my brother’s night-time confessions. Perhaps my body had adapted to this. This is what it expected. 

~~~~

Adaptation takes millions of years but eventually a school of fish will flop themselves onto land and become human. 

Had the firemen not dragged my father from the pool I would have, some day, known him as a fish. 

~~~~

We once had a fireman visit our high school to talk about fire safety. He spoke for two hours, reminding us every other sentence of the ease with which fire escalates and, though a small fire may seem insignificant, it could (and would) swallow everything in a room until there was nothing left to swallow and, its hunger not satiated, would swallow the house and all the air inside it. The boys in the class laughed and goofed around. Us girls listened as much as we thought it was expected of us. 

“What do you do if you find yourself trapped in a burning house?” he asked the class. 

“Run, obviously!” shouted one of the boys. 

“That may seem like the right thing to do but what you actually want to do is crawl on the floor,” said the fireman after the boys had stopped laughing. 

“You want us to crawl around in an inferno?” another boy shouted in a mocking tone. 

“I know it sounds crazy but most fatalities are caused by suffocation. The smoke in a house fire is toxic and will burn your lungs. Furthermore, the fire will strip the air of oxygen so whatever you breathe in won’t help. It’d be like drowning. If you’re trapped you need to stay below the smoke until we can come get you.”

“I’d rather die trying than roll around like a rotisserie pig!” 

~~~~

Dying in a house fire is preferable to drowning. Fire doesn’t leave you with a waterlogged corpse reminding you what you’ll be missing. 

~~~~

It was a shared funeral. We  buried the three empty caskets next to each other. Us parents agreed that the girls had grown up together, grown used to each other, and would miss each other in death provided there was anything to be experienced. As we spoke, us parents, I thought to myself that even if there was something after death, burying three empty caskets next to each other wouldn’t affect anything. In reality they had already been buried together. All of their ashes piled together on the earth where our house once stood, buried underneath what remained of our home, the charred wood still sizzling the water the firemen had dumped on it.