Onion Songs

FISH

He calls himself Fish because he swims at the bottom of the pond. Most everybody he knows glides so easy above, like life wasn’t even a second thought, even the ones who live hard, who fill their insides with sewage, they’re still high in the sky as far as Fish is concerned.

He don’t mind. Sometimes it’s safer swimming at the bottom. He can look up at their faces and see they’re looking at each other, hating on each other, but not seeing him at all.

“Get outta there, Fish!” That’s his brother Paul. But Fish just found somebody’s ring in the Trench, and he has hopes for more. Paul keeps his distance from the Trench, he has no belly for it, the Trench where they dump the bodies before they burn them. Bodies lay there two, three days so they smell like nothing ever smelled before, mommies and daddies and kiddies waiting to be burned by the burning crews, always short-handed, it being such a foul job. Fish has seen the burning, and he thinks it’s pretty, the way the flames go blue in places, like they caught a soul—souls burn blue. Houses of people, blocks of people, cities of people are dying every day—pretty soon, Fish thinks, the whole world will burn blue.

But Fish finally gives it up, crawls out and rolls around in the dirt to get the stink off, then crabs after Paul, low to the ground where Fish feels safe, the ring hid in his pants pocket. Paul says it’s time to eat, and Fish was born hungry.

Along the way they stay out of trouble even though trouble passes the time. Trouble always means you eat late.

Some slime-head has his tongue down the mouth of a little girl, but they pass him by like he was scenery, even though it makes Fish’s teeth ache.

Some bald woman sits in water and screams, pinching skin until she’s black-spotted, scratching herself until the skin runs.

A clean-up crew chatters about nothing while they beat an old man with electric fans and toasters, slinging any machine with a cord into the wrinkled face, snapping ribs, pounding dead arms and legs. Paul pushes Fish’s head away so he don’t see.

A so pretty lady lies on a sofa in the middle of the street. She’s been harvested, her parts replaced with rotten potatoes and corn. Fish gets away from Paul and swims right up to her. He don’t get upset—he just looks a long while trying to figure out what he sees.

Most of the houses are burning, those dead families a cloud of smell that creeps across the sky. But the sunset is still something beautiful, like Paul says it’s been since the beginning of time.

When they get home Mama has the food hot and waiting. But Fish swims in slow, careful of a kick and a stomp, a belt across the ear.

“Paul, get your brother up off the floor,” Mama says, and it’s like the daylight finally come, and Fish sees himself in the bright new kitchen, and there’s a great green tree out the window, and the voices of little kids playing outside.

“He was talking crazy again, Ma,” Paul sings like a crow, “and jumping out of his wheelchair, rolling around on the ground. It was embarrassing! I wish you’d let me tie him in if I have to take him out!”

“We’re not tying your brother to a chair like he was some kind of animal! Not like they do in those places. We’re his family, and it’s an honor for you to mind him. Some day you’ll understand that, I pray when it’s not too late.”

Mama cries as she and Paul help Fish back up into his chair, and Paul says he’s sorry, and everybody’s sad. Except for Fish, and Mama’s new boyfriend, standing in the door.

Fish jerks his head around, and remembers, laughing loud because they live in such a nice place, with sunshine and linoleum and good smells and no Trench outside waiting for them to make a mistake.

And then Fish looks at Mama’s new boyfriend again: the smoke in his face, the blue fire in his eyes, and remembers, and remembers there are things in the pond that swim even lower than Fish.