I'm Here by David Nikki Crouse

Author:David Nikki Crouse
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781597099356
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Make Me Whole

I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. A small crowd formed around what I first thought was a young child, someone about my age, but it was a fish, the largest fish I’d ever seen, almost as long as I was tall and shining silver-blue. I watched one man kneel as if to touch it, to speak to it. His hand rose and fell, just once and then more: a steady motion as if he might be hammering a nail, but he was clubbing its skull with a length of pipe. Four, five, six, seven times. His arm rose and fell. And when he did stop, after the eighth or ninth blow, he paused and knelt even deeper and clasped at its mouth with his other hand. It seemed that after killing it—after making very sure it was dead—he would now lean deeper, put his lips to its mouth, breathe deep, and try to bring it back.

He forced it open and looked inside its throat, searching for something down in there, his forearm disappearing down into its guts. I glanced up at my mother to verify that she was still with me. She was watching too, but with that same look of judgment she sometimes cast in my direction if they sent me home early for fighting, as if she put this in the same category as my black eyes and bruises and notes about detentions.

I followed her sight line. She was not looking at the fish, but at another man, standing a little further away and holding his hand. Twenty years have made the sight beautiful—the long spiral of green hose and the rainbow of diesel covering the dock as it mixed with thinning blood. They were washing it away, but it seemed to be coming up from between the boards. That was not the case, of course. The blood came from him, the man my mother was watching. It ran down his arm, his leg, and pooled around his black rubber boots. He gripped one hand with the other to make a double fist. That’s where the wound resided, somewhere in there, but his face didn’t register any pain. He seemed more curious than anything, expectant, as if he might be wondering what the other man might find down there in the throat of the fish as he crouched in close.

Two men in white jogged down the steep plank to the dock and I saw their ambulance behind us strobing red. The two men split, one to the injured man, one to the man kneeling, and they spoke as if they might be commenting on the weather. The kneeling man produced a knife. He ran it down the length of the fish and then dug in both hands. After a moment he held something up—a ring or a jewel—and then he handed it to the paramedic who cradled it in both palms. I had the sense that this ceremony had been conducted before, many times, although of course I knew that was ridiculous even then.

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