We Make Mud

Our Father is a Fish

We were down by the river, us brothers, fishing for fish, when Boy walked up to tell us what it was that he was dying to tell us: that he’d just seen himself a ghost. This ghost, Boy said it, it wasn’t just any ghost, this ghost that Boy said that he’d just seen. This ghost, Boy told us brothers, it was the ghost of a fish. A ghost fish? Brother asked this back, because he wanted to believe it. We wanted to believe that a ghost could be of a fish. That’s right, Boy said right back at us brothers. The ghost that I just saw it, this ghost, it was a fish. Where’d you see it, this ghost? was what I wanted to be told. Did Boy see it, this ghost, was what I wondered, down by the dirty river that runs through this dirty river town? Boy saw it, this ghost fish, was what Boy told us. I saw it, Boy said it, out back in the back of your house’s backyard. Out back in the back of our house’s backyard, there was a telephone pole back there studded with the chopped-off heads of fish. Each fish, each fish’s head, us brothers, we gave each one a name. Not one was called Jimmy or John. Jimmy and John was mine and my brother’s names. We called each other Brother. Boy, I said to Boy, this boy who was not one of us brothers. Boy, I said this word out loud again. Give me your hand, I said. Take me, I told him. Let me see this thing that you say that you’ve seen. Boy nodded with his boy head at us brothers and took hold of us by our hands. Us brothers, with Boy in between us, we walked like this back up and back away from the river, we were taken back, by Boy, by our hands, out back into the back of our backyard. Brothers, Boy said to us then, and here he stopped us in our walking up and out back. This is where I saw what I say that I saw, Boy said. Boy let go of us brothers by our hands so he could point up with just one of his hands up to the top of our fish-headed telephone pole, up to where those fish’s fish heads gazed down upon us brothers with their eyes and their mouths opened up wide for singing. Up at the top of this fish-headed telephone pole, up to where with his boy hand Boy was pointing up for us brothers to take us a look, we could see a fish’s head way up at the pole’s top. And this head, up here up at the top, it was the biggest fish head that us brothers had ever fished and it was the biggest fish head we had ever chopped off and it was the biggest fish head that we had ever hammered and nailed with our rusty, bent-back nails into that pole’s creosoted wood. Us brothers looked up, but then we looked our looking up look back down and back at each other. There was this look that us brothers sometimes liked to look at each other with. It was the kind of a look that actually hurt the eyes of the brother who was doing the looking. Imagine that look. That fish there, Brother said, and here he took Boy’s hand back into his own. That fish, I said, because I knew what Brother was going to say and what Brother was going to do next. That fish head, I then said. That fish, we both whispered into the holes in the sides of this boy’s head. This fish is our father, we said. And like this, with Brother holding Boy back up against this back-of-the-yard pole, us brothers, we chopped off this boy’s head.