flipping fish
Thwack. The head clean
off. The fish body flipping,
headless. Then still.
“Your turn.” Uncle hands
over bloody knife. Puts a fish,
flipping, on the board,
sink water splashing.
Red-soaked knife. Slippery fish.
Thwa. I dent the fish at best,
irritate it. Gives me nearly-dead
fish stink eye, now from the pier.
Freedom, salt water so close.
“Pick it up pick it up.”
Thwa. I plump flipping
fish, at best. An eye escapes
its socket. “Here,
like this.” I wanted to
not know how to separate
a fish body from a fish head.
I wanted to not know how
to thwack a flipping fish.
Or get the scales off the meat.
I wanted to read. I wanted to write.
It was midnight. The lights,
the pier, the fish, the water.
I was just a kid. It was 19
70 something. Think Steely
Dan. The Allmans. The Osmonds.
Think cow lick little me.
Now, I just wanted the fish
to live. I wanted to
please my dad, my uncle.
One or the other.
I wanted to not thwack the head
off the flipping fish. I wanted
to sleep, or walk on the sand,
or catch one of those little crab
things that scamper about.
Chase them and they’re gone.
Like a head on a flipping fish
in Holden Beach, the year of the Dan.
Steely knife. Steely Dan.
Years later, I’d work the pier.
Gil Bass, pier-manager,
showed me how to clean
the latrines, to throw out the scales,
how to make chili cheeseburgers.
It was 1985. Don Henley sang
about a sunset grill. A place that was
not Holden Beach. Nowhere close.
A few years later my dad died. He
loved that beach and those fish,
And his brother died. And his other
brother and another.
They should have been buried
in that sea, with those crabs
those fish, but they weren’t.
They wanted to be put in the ground,
full and whole, so on that day,
by and by, their head and their body
will be all of a piece, and they
will fly away, o glory, in that morning,
in the sweet by and by.
