By Maggie Wu.
Something is happening to me, I don’t know what, only that when I went to the bathroom one day during Mrs. X–’s class, a dead fish came out of my body and tumbled into the toilet bowl. It was flat and thin, crowned with petallike gills that shimmered under the dirty stall lights, a shock of red-orange against white. I did not know what to do. The toilet hadn’t flushed since the beginning of the year. If I left the fish in the bathroom, my classmates would be sure to trace its odor back to me; it reeked of rust and decay and salt water. So I took the little fish and I chewed it up. Salt flooded my mouth in a warm torrent. I did not tell anyone what I had done.
Not that I didn’t want to, I wanted to tell Mother, but I am in the fifth grade and fifth graders shouldn’t cling to their mothers. Last week, she gave me a book called The Care and Keeping of You, which meant that it was time for me to know all about my body. Besides, I started to remember stories of bad women who gave birth to babies behind dumpsters, like my best friend Nora’s sister with the big breasts, and how when I told Mother about her she hushed and grew cold, as if it had been me who had done something shameful. I thought about telling Nora too, but she had a big mouth, and the boys in class already liked to spit in my pigtails behind my back and tease me in a made-up foreign language to my face. I did not need anything more to draw attention to myself. No, nobody was to know.
For a while, I almost forgot what had happened to me. But a few months later, it came again, and again the month after, and again after that, always with the same flash of vivid surprise. Each time, I picked up the limp, slippery carcass with toilet paper, coccooning it like a sushi roll. Then I would sit on the toilet and feast. With every piscine encounter I grew heavy, as if the rich oils thickened my flesh. Long after my little fish returned to the sea inside me, I exuded the stench of seaweed for days after, each month more potent than the last. In the weeks between, my hunger waned for anything but relish and slime, my little clementine.
Mother didn’t notice, I don’t think. At night when she washed my hair, I could feel her breathing me in, inhaling in my ears. She stood so close to me that she blurred and I could not see her fully, only parts of her I did not recognize as Mother. In those moments, I could almost tell her: Mama, I’m unwell. Yet I didn’t want her to know, for she would think me disgusting. And though the words tilted on the tip of my tongue, almost volleying into the open, another part of me feared that speaking about my little fish would make it more real, another immutable abnormality of mine.
But then I went to Nora’s house. We were practicing our dance routine for the school talent show. She lived in a big white colonial in its own cul-de-sac with seven bedrooms and three bathrooms and a backyard gazebo. Our house only had three bedrooms and two bathrooms and no gazebo, and this seemed to quantify my inferiority, though I knew Mother and Daddy worked hard. But I did not want a mother who worked—I wanted a stay-at-home mother like Nora’s. She was the very image of the woman I wanted to be when I grew up: blithe with aristocratic elegance and pampered by a gorgeous husband. I wanted this with my whole body, but in my depths, I feared that it was Nora who would one day attain my dream, not me. We avoided speaking of her sister, who now lived somewhere else.
Nora never made me feel bad on purpose, but when I was with her I often did. My shyness fueled her vivacity, and it was true—she simply knew so much more, she was five months older and already wore a real bra and read all the celebrity gossip magazines Mother kept from me. But I did have one thing over her: a vision into a dimension of life that she hadn’t seen. I saw what my body was capable of producing, I felt the rich bliss of eating my own. And though my secret gave me shame, from this I also drew strength.
Before we rehearsed our dance, Nora raided her sister’s vanity. I borrowed her glitter Lip Smackers and pea flower blue eyeliner pencil and tried to contour, but the colors were too light for my skin. Pretty soon I was done, but Nora was taking her sweet time, puckering her lips and sucking in her cheeks as she dusted herself in powder. I was getting jittery, so I excused myself and went to the bathroom. There were so many bathrooms in Nora’s house that I’d made it a game to try them all, and the one in her sister’s shuttered room was the last I needed to see. The bathroom faced the backyard, shaded by a tall maple tree that tapped against the window. I was surprised when I entered: it was sleek and clean inside, contrary to the vulgar image I had of its prior inhabitant. Yet as I slid on the cool white tiles like an ice dancer, I slowly awakened to the stench of ammonia radiating from the toilet. Someone had forgotten to flush, and the bowl festered with old urine and a nugget of turd. I drew closer, peering into the jaundiced pool. The turd swam. I gasped. A fish! A fish! A big brown grouper in the bowl! It was rough and nasty, with goosebumps that made me gag, a jaggedness that was nothing like my neat red comet. But I knew—even though they diverged in color and shape and texture—that this one was of the same substance as mine. Only whose? And how was it still alive? And what incoherence—I couldn’t bear how it soiled the sanctity of the pristine bathroom. So I crouched before the bowl, inspecting the novel specimen. It gurgled, blowing a bubble that broke the surface, and my reflection shuddered in the water. I could not just leave it there. It would starve in its tiny pond. I took a glass from the counter and bottled it up.
When I opened the door, Nora was standing on the other side. I startled at the sight of her and didn’t have time to hide what was in my hands. Her skin was covered in coarse powder; her lips were greased with gloss. Her cheeks were crimson, like a clown’s. When she spoke, she snickered, revealing lipstick stains on her teeth: “Why do you have a cup of piss?”
I blushed at the discovery of my transgression.
“It’s a fish,” I said. “I found it in your sister’s toilet.”
Her smile faded. “Sorry. I forgot I’d left him in there.”
It had never occurred to me that Nora could make fish too. “It’s yours?” I said. “Is it from your body?”
“Duh,” she said. “Why else would he be in the toilet?” She pointed to the cup of piss. “Can I have that? I need to rehome him.”
Nora led us back into her bedroom, squatted low, slid a fishtank out from under her bed. Inside was a school of identical brown groupers, some meandering in circles, others floating still in place, deep in contemplation. “This is my aquarium,” Nora announced. At once, I was struck by a sense of betrayal that Nora hadn’t shared this with me; yet, of course, I had also kept my own little fish a secret. Nora told me she’d been getting them for the past year. She was saving them for her crush, Zachary, and would give them to him once she started middle school. I asked her why. She said that was just what people did when they were in love. I searched her face for any sign of fear, but I only found the clumps of black mascara and purple crystals that shaded her pale eyes.
I could no longer hold it in. My secret hurled out of me and I told her everything. Nora didn’t seem surprised by any of it. On the contrary, my saga bored her. “You know,” she said, “you aren’t supposed to eat them.” We didn’t say anything more after that, the conversation dissipating into silence. Nora turned on our music and we swayed our hips from side to side. You spin my head right round right round, sung the man in the song. “Did you know he’s singing about oral s-e-x?” said Nora. I hadn’t known. We danced until I heard Mother pull into the cul-de-sac, then Nora went downstairs to open the front door.
Alone, I fell to the floor. I was starting to feel nauseous and inverted, as if someone had grabbed my ankles and shaken me upside-down. The bubblegum pink walls of Nora’s bedroom blurred before me, shrieking and sugar-sick. Discovering that Nora shared in my burden didn’t make me feel less alone; in truth, it made me feel more freakish than before. I hadn’t known I was supposed to save my fish for someone I loved. Why hadn’t I known how to love? Wasn’t love supposed to be the most natural and universal force in our lives? Instead of what I should’ve done, I’d sat on the toilet seat and slurped, never even thinking to share, and I couldn’t, anyway, because my little fish was always dead. Why was it always dead? What was wrong with me? Some people knew so much more about the world than others. I did not deserve to be excluded from them. It was all so unfair.
Downstairs, Nora was talking with Mother. Under the bed, the aquarium gurgled with force. I pulled it into the light, its waters wavering in the golden afternoon with an iridescence I lacked. Everything I wanted was on the other side of the glass, and I could see it so clearly, I could almost touch it, but I would never reach it. And I was so hungry, I really was. My mouth watered at the sight of those juicy groupers. There was nothing else I could do. I took Nora’s fishes out one by one and swallowed them whole, each of them trembling between my fingers, their mouths gaping wide and empty. Only when they were long in my stomach did they still.
Now I am lying in bed with Mother, just like I did when I was small, and I wish I were so small again. I rest my head on Mother’s stomach and listen to her rise and fall, and as she drifts to sleep, I ask her if she was ever like me. Her stomach gurgles in response, and I feel the little fish inside suffocating underneath my weight, my old friends from my time inside. And now I’m sure: all I ever want to be is an aquarium just like her, clean and twinkling, bubbling and bright, like the crystal-eyed girls in magazines.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maggie Wu is a first-year MFA candidate in prose at the University of Notre Dame. Previously, her work has appeared in DIAGRAM. Her favorite fish is the anglerfish.
