by Anthony Abboreno
Claudette and Adam stood outside their RV, staring at the fish Adam had caught. Claudette hadn’t realized anything that huge grew in the Mississippi. It was the size of a Saint Bernard, its flesh gouged with scars like trails on an old mountain. Now, it lay in an inflatable wading pool decorated with pictures of cheerful sea animals, bobbing its head towards Claudette as though trying to speak, like a creature in a fairy tale: save my life, and I’ll become the husband you want, shining and beautiful.
Of course, she already had a fairy tale marriage, but it was one of the shitty fairy tales, from Russia probably, where the woodsmen were cruel to their wives and gold turned into dirt. Claudette had met Adam when she was still a recent transplant to Jackson from the Midwest. She had been working for a company that did promotion for local businesses, and after planning a grand opening for Adam’s computer repair company, he had sent flowers to her office. They had met for coffee and discovered that they both had grown up only a few hours apart, near the border between Iowa and Illinois.
After that had come poetry, sushi, and a marriage proposal after only three months. Love bombing—that was what a friend had called it—before Adam began monitoring Claudette’s text messages. He had seduced her into quitting her job and moving to a suburb where even the houses had a new car smell. Shazam: the girl who was once teased for smelling like cat pee was a beautiful housewife.
Now, Claudette was cold, pulling her jacket tight against the March damp. It was a stupid time for a road trip, but Adam had insisted.
“Not exactly sushi,” she said.
Adam pretended not to hear her. He knelt in front of the pool with his serrated scaling knife and glared at the fish.
“You been hitting on my girl?” he said. “You promising to take her out to dinner?” It was the same routine he used in bars to start a fight.
He looked at Claudette to make sure she was watching. Even though it was cold, he was only wearing an undershirt, his muscles seething and sweating like rodents trapped in his flesh.
“If you do this,” Claudette said, “I’m leaving you.”
Adam recoiled, feigning dismay to hide real anguish. His emotions nested like Tupperware; you opened one container and there was another inside, identical but smaller.
“You think this guy can support you?” he said. He turned the knife in his hand, rubbing his thumb across the plastic handle, and lowering his voice. “You think he’ll live with you in the shelter?”
He knew how much Claudette was afraid of homelessness. They stared at each other, weighing their bargaining power. Adam had everything: the house, the RV, and his career. Claudette only had herself.
Adam called her bluff, and without another word lurched to grab the fish, missing it at first and splashing water across his face. He lashed out with the knife and gashed its fin while it thrashed, then came back for another cut across its side. The water turned the color of strawberry jam. Eventually, the fish stopped moving, and Adam slashed it open across the belly so he could pull out its guts. But instead of the dark red of the liver, heart, or intestines, a small hand dropped out, covered in yellow membranes like cobwebs.
“It must have ate a kid,” Adam said. He was shaking. “That happens with alligators. They kill them and find dog collars in there. This is the big bastard you wanted to save.”
Claudette knew Adam was trying to turn the tables on her and make her seem like the monster. Guilt was one way he liked to keep the upper hand.
Adam cracked the fish open like a beer cooler, and they both stared at what was inside. No heart. No lungs. No stomach. Just a boy, maybe ten-years-old, blue eyes gazing empty at the world, brown hair plastered to his face with what looked like snot, tighty-whities stained yellow, knees bent, one arm dangling and the other across his chest, clutching something. All over him, everywhere, were those webs, in places thick as the fibers of a pumpkin.
Claudette had never seen Adam so shocked. It was as though she had finally got to the bottom of the Tupperware.
“Is he breathing,” Claudette said.
Adam remembered himself. “What kind of ignorant question,” he said, but held his hand to the boy’s throat anyway, feeling for a pulse. He shook his head.
“It’s just a fish.” He stood up.
“A dead boy inside a fish,” Claudette said.
“Nope.” He corrected. “If we had found a dead boy inside a fish, the police would want to know. They’d have a lot of questions about what I was doing fishing without a license.” He kicked the side of the pool. “What kind of fish is missing a heart, anyway?”
She was used to Adam lying as a power play. A year ago, when she had decided to look for a job, he had hidden her car keys before the interview and then accused her of losing them herself. But this was deeper, more like covering up a murder. Claudette couldn’t fathom why he would be willing to tell a lie this big, over a situation that, to her, seemed so clear.
“You’ve been sniffing snow globes,” Adam said, and turned to signal the conversation was over.
The RV door slammed behind him. The sun was starting to go down, and it was getting too cold for Claudette’s flimsy jacket. As she gazed at the boy, she felt her resolve to contact the authorities deflate while her anxiety grew. Probably, Adam was right. The boy’s presence was too strange, and there would be too much to explain. This thing would only upset the delicate balance they shared; there would be repercussions she couldn’t bear. She felt her grip on reality dissolve like ice melting in a whiskey glass. That’s what living with Adam was like.
There were no organs in the fish. It hadn’t swallowed the boy; it was the boy, with lips delicate as a butterfly’s wings. She imagined what it would be to get down on her knees and kiss him back to life.
That night, Claudette lay awake while Adam slept beside her, not just warm but hot, as though the furnace that drove him burned all night. Outside, Claudette heard a squeak, like a wet hand sliding across rubber, followed by a splash. She closed her eyes tighter and imagined coyotes, hungry from winter, tearing chunks out of the fish and the dead boy and rinsing their snouts in the bloody water. Finally, she wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and went to the window.
In her exhaustion, the first thing she imagined was a giant spider, with long limbs pale as the moonlight, bent over and drinking, but when it turned, she saw it was more like a person with arms and legs that were far too skinny and long. She couldn’t make out his face through the dirty glass. He beckoned to her.
She knew that Adam would enjoy chasing off an intruder because it would give him something to hold over her later. And so, she didn’t want to wake him at all, if she could help it. She grabbed the scaling knife he had left by the kitchen sink and put on her slippers to go outside by herself and confront this creature who had trespassed upon her beautiful sleeping boy.
The wind outside cut the last sleep from her, and the first thing she saw with clarity was that the pool was almost empty now. There were shreds of scale-covered skin draped over the sides, and the water was so dark it looked black in the moonlight, but there was no boy. The creature had retreated to a cluster of trees, where it was mostly hidden. There was something wrong with it, as if a smaller form had been pulled like taffy, and there were shapes attached that didn’t belong: a row of spines stretched with translucent skin, and a patch of shining scales. Its face was hidden in shadow, except for two beautiful blue eyes.
Claudette understood. This creature hadn’t taken her boy; it was her boy, turned to a fish, and now reborn.
“I have something for you,” he said and held out a locket on a chain.
Claudette stopped, just at arm’s reach, and held her knife ready while she snatched the locket. It was cast in two halves of garnet stone, shaped like a heart, and had a clasp of copper tarnished green. The boy retreated further into the trees while she examined it.
Holding the stone gave her confidence that what she was experiencing was not a dream. She had to see more of the boy. If she could, things would come together like tumblers in a lock.
“Don’t hide,” she said and took a step closer.
The boy put out a hand to stop her. His fingers were thin as crab legs and webbed.
“Your husband is wicked,” he said.
Claudette nodded.
“Life as a fish has taught me things,” the boy said. “In the water, there is no such thing as distance. You can feel the rolling of a drop from a melted glacier, down a river to the sea. You can see the mind of an insect, fallen from a branch into a world it can never escape: an insect you must eat. Because of the water, I know things I shouldn’t, so listen carefully.
“Your husband hides more, from his past and his present, than even you have guessed, and you are in danger. The home he gave you has been foreclosed, and his business is gone. He has taken insurance on your life, big enough to cover his debts and then some. He imagines you are a burden and is planning an accident.”
Claudette considered the boy’s words. Her marriage was a pool of murky water; she had never dredged the bottom.
The boy continued. “Inside the locket is a powder,” it said. “Give it to your husband, and he’ll become a better man.”
The next morning, Claudette awakened to the sound of thumping on the wading pool outside, a loud squeak, the snap of rubber collapsed and then released. For a moment, she imagined that the boy had returned and decided that the wading pool was the source of his woes, and he needed to do battle with it. But when she looked next to her, she found that Adam was already awake and out of bed. The sounds must have been him trying to put the pool away.
She was still holding the locket. She sat up and opened it; the latch was corroded, and she had to pry it apart with her thumbnails. What the boy had described as a powder was really a cluster of jagged crystals, like spined anemones, so sharp they might lodge in her skin if she touched them.
Claudette imagined them sliding down Adam’s throat and slicing his intestines and thought of presenting the locket as evidence in court: “I met a fish boy, and he told me these would make my husband good.” Taking the boy’s word wasn’t enough.
She snapped the locket closed and hid it under the mattress just before Adam came inside, covered in blood and stinking.
“Animals took the meat last night,” he said. “Except a few scraps. No fish breakfast for us.”
He smiled at his joke, as if he weren’t soaked in gore. “We’ll do pancakes instead. Sorry to disappoint you.”
When Adam wanted to put on a show, he could. It was part of how he made amends for transgressions and reeled Claudette back in. This time, he displayed his talents outside with the camp stove: fluffy pancakes with cinnamon and a drizzle of vanilla frosting, bacon, and strong coffee. While he cooked, he chattered about the fun they would have on the trip. He asked if she was excited to see Wisconsin Dells, a place she once visited with family, where she could remember riding waterslides in an inner tube and her parents being happy for days.
Of course, this was off-season. Most of the water attractions would be closed. But bars would be open, and there were other draws, like Ripley’s Believe it or Not.
After Adam had finished cooking, they sat in folding chairs to eat. The food smelled so good, it nearly overpowered the reek of the water Adam had dumped from the wading pool, creating a bloody swamp only a few yards away.
“There’s a fishing spot I wanted to show you,” Adam said, “near where I grew up. My friend and I used to go there as kids. Bald eagles migrate there.”
He took a pancake and squinted, pillaging his vocabulary. “Resplendent,” he said. It wasn’t clear whether he was talking about the eagles or his cooking.
Either way, the pancakes were good: crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside. The coffee was just bitter enough to counter their sweetness. Its warmth gave Claudette the courage to pry for answers that might give perspective on what the boy had said. She knew eagles couldn’t be the only reason they were camping in the cold and wet.
“It’s symbolic,” Adam said. “Spring is coming.”
He sucked bits of pancake from his teeth while he collected himself. “A time of rebirth,” he said. “I’ve been having problems with the business, and I needed to get away.”
Adam’s business, Nerd Alert, made most of its money fixing cracked iPhone screens. It had always seemed improbable that this could pay for the house they enjoyed, but Adam had sworn to her that repairing iPhone screens was big money, and even bigger money was coming. Adam was working on a social network for web 3.0. There were already a lot of social networks, it was true, but when Adam talked about this one he could convince her it was special. Southern Mississippi was going to be the new Silicon Valley.
“I got stiffed,” Adam said, “Do you remember that guy I introduced you to, Carl?”
She remembered him. Adam had brought him over for dinner, and Carl had spent the entire meal picking mushrooms out of the lasagna she had made, declaring his hatred for them like a bossy child. More memorable still had been the incident months later, when he returned red-faced to their driveway while Adam was out at work, waving a stack of printouts in her face as if she were capable of resolving a problem Adam had caused.
“These screenshots are dummies,” he had said, referring to the printouts, which were supposedly pictures of the completed user interface, “He made these in photoshop.”
And he had shown her how Adam had spliced together pictures from UIs other people had designed: a little piece from Gab, another from Tinder. The more audacious elements were from Twitter and Facebook, with the colors changed to become less identifiable. Carl had invested fifty grand in Adam’s project on the basis that it was nearly finished, but it turned out that there was nothing for him but those screenshots. Later, when she brought it up with Adam, he dismissed it as nothing.
Talking about Carl now, Adam shook so violently he almost dropped his pancakes.
“Can you believe that bastard is suing? It’s standard to do a mock-up. He knows we’ve got a mortgage. And those earrings I bought you for Christmas? Am I supposed to sell your Christmas present?”
He continued building an image of Carl as a man who wanted to take everything from him, and from Claudette, out of spite. Then abruptly he stopped, and excused himself to pee.
On his way to the trailer, he paused to contemplate the wading pool. For a moment, he looked desperate as a lost child, and it was easy to remember times when Claudette had believed he was a sweet man she could nourish. When she had first visited his apartment, there had been a potato sprouting leaves in the sink.
Once Adam had moved out of sight, Claudette heard a rustle from the forest behind her. In the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of bone white; a hand scuttled in the dirt. It was the long-limbed boy.
“Now,” it said. “Empty the locket into his coffee.”
She brought it from her pocket and touched the smooth garnet, thinking that the mottled red and black seemed perfect for an object of violence. Then she held it out over Adam’s coffee mug, sitting on the ground where he had left it, but couldn’t bring herself to finish the deed.
“Give me time,” she said.
In Northern Illinois, near the Iowa border, there were mounds of snow that had accumulated, melted, and refrozen by the roadside; they were now melting again, memorializing an erratic February. Adam took a route that followed the Mississippi, where Claudette could see how the river had swollen from runoff, covering the bottoms of trees that would ordinarily grow near the bank. In the distance, a bird loped through the air, huge and powerful. She wondered what it would be like to fly away from Adam, and Carl, and the boy with his beautiful blue eyes, just following the river until the sun set and turned the world purple as a healing bruise.
“I think that’s a vulture,” Adam said. “Not an eagle.”
Vulture or eagle, she was in the realm of magic now.
“That boy in the fish was holding something,” she said.
Adam’s hands tightened on the steering wheel until his arms shook. “What keeps you on that hallucination shit?”
She would have let the subject drop, but Adam’s grip on the steering wheel relaxed, and he resumed the conversation.
“Let’s say we had a shared vision,” he said. “What did that boy look like to you? To me, he looked like an old friend, from grade school, a real piece of shit who used to torture mice. He’d buy humane traps from the hardware store and leave them outside, not even in his house for trespasser mice, but in the field behind it, for mice that were minding their own business. And once they crawled in the trap for a little peanut butter, they were in his power.
“He was a bully, and he roped me in. Have you ever enjoyed being mean?”
Claudette admitted that she had not.
“At first, it’s like a puzzle. You find something to break another person, and it lights you up. If you had something bothering you, you’re bothered a little less, but it’s like liquor. The pain comes back, and then you’ve got your hangover to deal with, and sometimes even worse, some bastard comes along to punish you. Punishers act so righteous, but they’re just mouse-torturers: they’ve caught their prey and now they’re going to cut its legs off while it squeaks.
“That’s who I thought I saw in that fish. But he’s been dead since we were kids. I’ve been thinking about him because we used to go fishing together, right in the spot where I’m taking you. I’ve got some bad memories to go with the good ones.”
Claudette put her hand on his shoulder instinctively, to soothe him.
The pavement disappeared, and they were driving on dirt, more slowly now, gravel and sticks popping beneath their tires, trees looming so dense on either side that Claudette couldn’t even see the horizon, which was usually such a prominent thing in the Midwest; the vast emptiness of fields one of the few things you could count on. The weather itself was so mercurial and ready to disgorge tornadoes and windstorms, cold that could freeze in seconds, and heat that could harden your thoughts like plaster.
Finally, Adam pulled into an alcove where the RV could sit nestled in the trees. It seemed isolated. They hadn’t seen another car for miles, and from where they were parked, she couldn’t see the road.
Adam carried his fishing rod and tackle box with him as they left the RV. Claudette hoped that he would not want to fish too long. The weather was still above freezing, but the dampness from the nearby river and the melting snow crept into her flesh even through her jacket. Living in the South meant that she had dispensed with her heaviest winter clothing and even her winter boots. As they walked through the forest, her shoes sank into the spongy soil, dampening her socks. Somewhere nearby, she heard a roar like a radio turned to static.
A bird screamed, and Adam made her stop and listen until another bird returned the call. Somehow, Claudette was able to recognize the sound; she must have heard it on TV.
“That’s them,” Adam said. “We’re almost there. When they make their northern migration, this is one of their favorite places to stop. There’s a dam just downstream. The fish get sucked into the undertow and spit out the other side, so the eagles can just swoop in and pick them up.”
He laughed. “They’re lazy. Anything strong has to be.”
He looked satisfied with this piece of philosophy, as deep as any he had uttered.
“I’ll show you where my buddy and I used to fish,” Adam said.
Claudette was so focused on keeping her footing between roots and leaves and patches of melting snow that she didn’t notice they had left the tree line until Adam told her to look up. She had grown up only a few hours from this place, and yet she had never realized it was here. She had seen bald eagles on money and on patriotic shirts, even painted on a neighbor’s garage superimposed over the American flag, but never the actual bird.
Now, eagles were everywhere, innocent as sparrows. They clustered in trees on both sides of the bank, the juveniles brown with patches of dirty gray and the adults black with curved beaks and regal white heads, so enormous that you couldn’t believe the branches they were sitting on could hold them. One squawked and shat a stream down the trunk of a nearby tree, while another swooped overhead towards the roaring river, so close she could almost touch its greasy belly. The roar of water and the dam downstream made the soundtrack to everything, forming a crescendo that wouldn’t end—water swollen with snowmelt bashing against rocks, foaming as it picked up speed, scenting the air like fresh fish and petrichor.
Adam watched her take it in. There were reasons why she had fallen in love with him; it hadn’t all been false. There were pancakes and moments of kindness and an eye for the kind of experience that moved her. He walked her to a rocky outcropping overlooking the river and pointed downstream, where the churning water created a hazy mist.
“You have to be careful here because as you get further downstream, the water develops an undertow. Once the undertow sucks you in, there’s no way to get back out. It will press you against that concrete dam, and it won’t let you go until you’re dead.
“That’s what got my friend. We were fishing right here, on this rock, and it was slippery, just like it is now. He leaned over to reel in a fish and slipped, and that was it. They never even found him.”
Claudette looked over the ledge at a six foot drop to the rocks below. It wasn’t a long way to go, but even if you avoided hitting your head it would be a tough swim.
And then, Adam pushed her. It was not a gentle shove or an accidental stumble, and later he would probably blame it all on Claudette’s own clumsiness. How strange that two people in Adam’s life would die the exact same way, surely insurance agents and police both would think to investigate, but Adam’s thoughts didn’t work like that, Claudette knew. If something worked for him once, he assumed it would work every time, and to be fair, it usually did.
As her feet slid, she turned and grabbed Adam’s jacket with one hand to try and stabilize herself, and he reached down and squeezed her wrist, the pain just enough to loosen her grasp so she fell down, stomach lurching, until her head hit the rocks below. The next thing she understood was that it was night time, and she was soaking wet and shivering beside the river bank, a voice like rotten meat murmuring in her ear.
Her boy had saved her. He had brought her fresh clothes, stolen from the RV, and even a bottle of whiskey to help her feel warm. While she sat there drinking, she saw that he had become a man, at least mostly. His ears were like fins, and his eyes bulged, but the rest of his body was beautiful and strong. She could get used to bulging eyes.
But there were other things bothering her. “Is it true you used to torture mice?”
The man raised his hand as if he wanted to slap her. “I spent twenty years as a fish,” he said. “You think that was for nothing?”
She stood, brandishing the whiskey bottle. “Come any closer and I’ll smash you,” she said.
The locket was sitting on the ground by her wet clothes, and she snatched it up. There was a cut on the back of her head that had bled all the way down her shoulders, and when she bent over, it made her dizzy. She certainly had a concussion but didn’t give a single shit. The man did not pursue her as she staggered into the forest.
She found Adam at the clearing where they had parked the RV. He had built a fire, and was cutting kindling for it against a tree stump. By the stump was a six pack of Michelob, but Adam had only started on the first bottle. He had nothing but disdain for heavy drinkers.
“I’m so sad,” he announced, loud enough for the forest to hear. It was as though he was testing the words, trying to access a feeling through intonation. “I can’t believe she’s gone.”
When Claudette emerged from the tree line, pale as a ghost, and stood by the fire, he started to cry. When she picked up the ax he had left buried in the tree stump, his eyes followed it, but he pretended not to notice.
“I’m glad you’re back,” he said. “My love, my love.”
“How much would you get for killing me,” she said. “How much would life insurance pay out?”
“Not enough to replace you,” he said, a liar until the end.
She took his beer bottle and showed him the locket, forcing him to see how it shined in the firelight, and after she emptied it into his beer, she ordered him to drink. She thought of a boy who couldn’t take care of himself, a boy who was used to getting his way and couldn’t understand why the world would be so cruel as to deny him anything. She thought of a man she loved in her way while he had loved in his: as a tool. Adam pretended to be brave as he took a swallow and set the bottle down, searching for a means of escape, even from this.
“Do I need to go to the hospital?” he said.
But the change had already begun. Sweat dripped from his body in streams, soaking the ground, and his arms and legs began to shrink until he was just an enormous fish, flopping in the dirt with gills flared so desperate and wide you could put your fist in them.
Claudette opened a fresh beer and drank it while the fire roared, thinking of how she loved trees and hated men, dreaming that someday she might turn into an enormous bird and carry fish to a home nestled between branches, unburdened by expectations.
Anthony M. Abboreno‘s fiction has been featured in Story Magazine, Copper Nickel, Outlook Springs, and others. He is part of the English faculty at Scott Community College in Iowa and holds a PhD in fiction writing and literature from University of Southern California, as well as an MA in the same subjects from University of Southern Mississippi.