We Make Mud

Our Mother is a Fish

One night, us brothers, we go to get our mother by the elbows up, up out of her sleeping bed, and we walk her back into our back of the house room, and here we lay her body down into the bed that, us brothers, this is where we do our sleeping in. Go to sleep, we say, to this mother of ours. Rest up. But when we lay our mother’s body down into this bed that is our brothers’, this bed, it is not a big enough bed for our mother’s body to fit all the way down in it. Our mother’s legs, when we lay her head down like this in this not-big-enough bed, her mother legs stick out from this bed’s bottom, what our mother always calls the bed’s foot. And when, us brothers, we push down hard with our boy hands to get our mother’s legs to go back up into us brothers’ bed, the head that is our mother’s, it sticks up and out from the head that is the bed’s top. Us brothers, we go back and forth like this, pushing the head that is our mother’s back into where the bed and the pillow is, then it’s us pushing our mother’s legs and feet back up so that they don’t hang down off of where the foot of this bed is: head, legs, push, head, legs, push: get the picture? We walk around and around this bed that is us brothers’ and we look all around this room to see if there is some way for us to get our mother’s whole body, her head and her legs and feet, to get all of this to fit into this bed that is us brothers’ bed for us to share. Us brothers, we don’t know what we are going to do, or how we are going to get our mother — her head, her legs, her feet — into our bed, until we look outside our bedroom’s window and there we see our fish. Outside our bedroom’s window, out back in the back of our house’s backyard, us brothers, there is a back-of-the-yard telephone pole studded with the chopped off heads of fish. These fish, these fishes’ fish heads, hammered and nailed into this pole’s creosoted wood, they are looking back out at us brothers, open-eyed, open-mouthed, and it’s like they’re singing to us brothers. When, us brothers, we see these fishes, these fish heads, singing out to us brothers like this, us brothers, we know that there is only one thing that us brothers can do. Brother, I say to Brother, and I nod at him with my head. You can go first. Brother, I say, give me your hand, I say. Hold your hand out against this room’s dark. Brother, being the brother that he is, Brother does what he is told. Good, Brother, I say. We are brothers, us brothers are. We are each other’s voices inside our own heads. Here, I take hold of Brother’s hand like this, and then I hand to him, into Brother’s reached out hand, the knife that, us brothers, we use this knife to gut out the guts and to cut off the heads off of the fish that we fish out of this dirty river that runs its way through this dirty river town. Mother, Brother says, and here, us brothers, we look at each other with our look. There is this look that us brothers, we sometimes like to look at each other with this look. It’s the kind of a look that actually hurts the eyes of the brother who is doing the looking. Imagine that look. This is gonna hurt you, Brother says to our mother, more than it is going to hurt us, Brother says. And just like this, us brothers, with one brother’s hand teaching the other, we take hold of our mother like this, and like this, and like this. Like this, we cut off our mother’s head.