Big, Weird, Lonely Hearts by Allen C. Jones

Author:Allen C. Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MidnightSun Publishing

SINCE WHEN DID THE BEACH GET SO CROWDED?

In the deep north, where silence is sacred and emotions considered continental, a seven-year-old girl named Lina saw dead fish everywhere. They peeked their bulging eyes from market baskets, feigned sleep in the cerements of yesterday’s news, and scattered everywhere a slippery confetti of scales. Even her mother’s hands, as they tucked Lina into bed, reeked of the submarine dead.

It is normal, her mother assured her. People are hungry, and I am a fishmonger. Sigrun was her mother’s name and she was born on the last island in the world as you head north. She was the only woman who mongered on the docks and she bellowed her catch as well as any of them:

‘Ten pounds of cod comin’ atcha, yellowtail fresher than a mermaid’s breath, fish heads bagged and tagged and ready for stew.’

Sigrun could clean a barrel of salt over her head in a single motion, and when she did this, she held it up to the sky and shook it a little, looking to Lina like a rapturous barbarian offering her child to the gods.

The men tried to do it too, of course, but they grunted like pigs, their neck veins nearly burst and the barrels always shifted suspiciously, as if someone had poured out half the salt on the sly.

Walking on the beach one Tuesday, truant from her elementary school, Lina found she could barely pick her way through the piles of fish, their blood glinting like polish on her bright red boots. In the plaza by the docks, a pair of dolphins had died in a circle like a yin-yang symbol. She nudged a seal, his body thrown against a bag of fish guts. Not the seals too, she thought. But he was only sleeping.

‘Any idea about the dead fish?’ she asked the seal.

‘Fads come and go,’ he said. ‘First, it’s short skirts, then the loud music, then the death. Nothing ever changes.’

‘Is there any meaning behind it all?’

‘I’m just an aging northern seal, trying to get a little sun on the old belly.’ He eyed her hands for knives. ‘Could you roll me a bit?’ he asked. ‘I’ve only got flippers.’

She asked her mother about the mass suicide at the beach.

‘You have such an imagination,’ her mother said. ‘Fish have neither the gumption nor imagination to off themselves. We must do it for them.’ She pointed a bloody finger toward the wire drying racks, each parallel length puncturing five hundred fry, the eager rows of upturned bodies curing for Sigrun’s famous snack packs.

‘People come from miles around,’ Sigrun said, popping a fry into her mouth.

‘What about the corpses in my dreams?’

‘My sweet skatte-latte,’ Sigrun said, her expressionless face struggling to show how much she cared for her daughter. ‘You really are your mother’s daughter.’ She offered Lina a handful of fry, blanched and crisp as corn nuts. ‘We have always been fishmongers and we always will be. That is the only explanation you need.’

‘They look so helpless,’ Lina said, avoiding her mother’s eyes by staring down at the fry splayed across her palm.

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