Cell Fish
by Evelyn Hampton

He shook the bag onto the table but something stayed inside. I had the feeling he wasn't telling me some things.


"What's in the bag?"


"What?"


Earlier we had watched a documentary about people who live in tunnels. One man had built a tunnel from his kitchen to a nearby country so that he could buy cigarettes and guns. He said that when he walked anywhere above ground, he imagined the thin ground falling in certain places, and dust.


We were inside a tiny Mexican restaurant finishing a meal. A man blew smoke out of two holes. The exhaust fan sounded like bagpipes.

 

We took the boat and were on the lake all day. The water had been frozen until recently and was still cold; if I put my hand under for long enough, my body would forget my hand.


I put my hand that my body had forgotten on his forehead. He was getting sick or the sky had not ever been that green, milk torn out of a leaf.

He asked for the aloe because he was being burned. As I passed him the aloe he let go of the oar. He slumped forward and I noticed that the moon was rising. I held the aloe toward the moon.

 

"I'm afraid," the doctor said, "He's very sick." I could see the moon through her window. Outside it wasn't dark, yet when I projected my life ten minutes into the future, it seemed dark and flat, like a screen after a movie based on someone else's life.


He was lying on a gurney somewhere in a room where he couldn't see the moon. The inside of his body was exposed to a technician, who in a different room watched him on a screen.


One time when he and I were having sex, I had tried to think of the inside of him. I thought of fluids being squeezed through tight, muscular cavities. It seemed crowded in there, and when I felt his body flex against me, like there was no space for me.


On the technician's screen, the inside of him looked like the entrance to a cave or a long hallway.

I'm afraid of him, I thought. I thought of us having sex that night and me falling into him, slipping into a space I would have to travel.


The doctor pressed her fingertips together, enclosing the space in front of her face. When she spoke, her voice seemed to come out of the space closed by her hands.


She said something about seeing. Would he lose his vision? "Wait," she said, "What am I forgetting?" She dropped her hands.


When I noticed that she was wearing a mood ring, I was able to open up.

 

I took our boat out every morning. Something in the water communicated something to the air so that the two remained separate, though mornings they were a little mixed together, and fog rippled below each stroke of my oar, and water collected in the part of my hair.


Summer got hotter. I could tell that I was getting stronger. Fish swam to the surface early in the morning, then darted down to where it was darker when the sun reflected on the water. Everything I looked at seemed to be hiding a lot of activity, as if what I saw were just outer walls. When I poked a fish floating belly-up with my oar, a smaller fish swam slowly out.


I rowed to what I thought was the center of the water. When I got there I thought, This must be the center, because I'd just had the idea to take off all of my clothes and sit on them to keep from getting splinters.


When I was naked, I thought, I'm probably the strongest I've ever been. The sun was bright and felt good on my skin.I was looking at the smoothness of a muscle in my forearm. Just then a fish leaped out of the water and over the front of my boat. I could see each scale, and I could also see the fish. I looked behind me. My boat had not gone anywhere but I had gone somewhere and come back.

 

"I caught a fish," I told him. After I'd gone to the center and back, I tied up the boat and put on my clothes, took out his fishing pole and lure and fished from the dock. It took a long time to lure a fish from the dark under the surface, exactly as much time as it had taken the sun to go from noon to behind the tall pines.


"What kind of fish is it," he asked. I could see him breathing. He wasn't wearing a shirt and his chest was pale and the skin at his neck fluttered like he was breathing through it.


"I don't know," I said. I held it up. It was dead, but when it was still moving I had grabbed it with my hands, though I didn't like how it felt to hold something that was fighting against me.


"It isn't a bass," he said, "But it's still big."


"Are you hungry?" I asked. He moved his mouth.

 

He had stopped eating but he was still moving his mouth. He had hardly eaten. His bones looked like a lashed-stick raft. A bird landed a short distance from our table.


On the table, pushed to an edge, was a pile of bills from the doctor.


"I'm afraid for you," I told him, "But also for myself."


He wanted to know what the doctor had told me on the phone. While she talked to me I looked out to the water because that was the biggest thing I could see; I wanted the water to cancel something out.


When I looked at the table my eyes went right to a knot in the wood. "I don't remember," I lied to him.


I looked up in time to see the bird carrying a bony spine in its beak. That was the last of our fish.


"I'm going to make us dessert," he said.

I waited a long time at the table, and then I walked down to the dock. I waited until the sky was completely dark, and then I walked back to the house.


He had scooped ice cream into bowls and the ice cream had melted. I felt one of the bowls and it wasn't cold. Everything had evened out. I didn't feel so strong. The light in the room was off. I heard his breath and felt something soft around my neck.

 

Evelyn Hampton co-edits Dewclaw, a journal of prose/poetry/illustration. Her work appears, or soon will appear, in Unsaid, Birkensnake, the Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her website is Lisp Service.

 

 

 

All Material © 2009 The New Yinzer and its respective authors