We Make Mud

Fish Heads: Revisited, or The Fish Head that Got Away

Once, us brothers, we caught us a fish with a fish head so big, us brothers, we couldn’t cut off this fish’s head. This fish, fished up and out from the dirty river that runs through this dirty river town, when we tried to cut off this fish’s fish head, this fish, it would not die. Us brothers, with our fish-cutting knives fished up out of our trouser pockets, we couldn’t cut through it, this fish, this fish’s big head. We took turns, us brothers did, trying to cut off this fish’s big fish head. We even worked us brothers together, cutting at this fish’s head like brothers, one brother holding onto each end of the knife and each of us brothers sawing, back and forth, back and forth with this fish-cutting knife. Us brothers, we’d seen pictures of men with big men beards, lumberjacks with boots laced up to their knees, cutting down trees like this, working the big-toothed saw blade between them together, cutting down trees so big these men could actually stand up inside the cut that they were making to make a tree come falling down. Us brothers, we sawed like this, back and forth and back and forth, cutting and cutting, chopping and chopping, the knife’s silvery blade singing between us, in our hands, until our hands began to bleed. But this big fish with its big fish head, this fish, it wouldn’t die, its fish head, it wouldn’t let us cut it off. Even when, us brothers, after a time, we took our knife and we stuck it, we stabbed it, straight down into the top of this fish’s big fish head, even still, even then, this fish, it didn’t stop its living. This fish, with this fish-cutting knife sticking up and out from the top of its big fish head, us brothers, we washed our hands of this big fish. Back to the river, us brothers, we hissed these words into the eyes of this fish, and like this, us brothers, we each of us stuck our arms, in up to our elbows, up and inside the big red gills of this big, big-headed fish. And like this, each of us brothers, each one of us standing by the sides of this fish, we dragged this fish back to the river. Go, Fish, we said to this fish. Be free, we said, and we pushed and we rolled this big, big-headed fish out into the river’s muddy water. Like this, this fish, it swam away, it did not say to us brothers thank you or goodbye. But wait, us brothers, we called out to this fish after we’d just told it to go back away. Our knife! us brothers, we cried out after and out to this fish. You forgot to give us back our knife! Our knife, the knife that we used to cut off the heads off of our fish, this knife that we used to gut the guts out of our fish, it was still sticking up and out from the top of this fish’s big fish head. This fish, with its fish head still on it, it didn’t listen to us brothers. To this fish, us brothers, we could not say to it, Good, Fish. Us brothers, we stood there like this, on the muddy edge of this dirty river that runs its way through this dirty river town, and we watched this fish, out and into our river, this fish, it swam itself away. After a while, us brothers, the only part of this fish that we could see was the sticking-up knife, sticking up out of this fish’s big fish head, cutting through the mud that was the river. And then, after a little while more, there was no more knife left for us brothers to see, there was only the river with this fish somewhere down inside it, there was only the moon in the sky and the mud of the river holding us all in this place.