We Make Mud

Our Mother is a Fish: Revisited

Our mother is a fish that drowned in the muddy river that runs its rusty nail through our muddy river town. Our river, our town, rusty with mud and smoke and steel, it is more mud than it is river, it is more dirt and mud and smoke and steel than it is town. Us brothers, one day, found our mother washed up on the river’s muddy shore, side by side, side-faced, with rusted cans and rusted parts of cast-away metal. Our fish-faced mother was laying face-to-the-side on the right side of her body, her fish body a water-soaked bag of skin and bones with not much else inside it. Our mother’s one eye, her left, that was facing up out of the up at us brothers, it was stuck-in-the-mud open and was looking up at us as if it was looking up at us. When I said so to Brother, Brother asked, Looking at us? Why? was what Brother wanted to know. What could she want from us? She wants us, I explained this to Brother, to take her back home with us. Our mother, Brother then set out to explain this to me, is looking at us with what she always looked at us with when she looked her eyes down at us. What I said to this was, What? How? What does she want? What our mother wants from us, Brother, Brother pointed this out, is what she has always wanted from us. I waited to hear whatever it was that Brother was about to say next. She wants us to leave, Brother said. She wants us to go. I’m surprised, Brother said, she’s not turning over right now in her muddy grave to see and to know that there’s nothing more for her to do. I can fix that, I told Brother. I told this to our mother too, and then I turned our mother over and onto her back. This turning over of our mother, I did this with my foot, my boot, the tip of it, the toe, it was thickly-covered with mud. Look, I said to Brother. Brother listened, then looked. We both did. We looked our fish-of-a-mother right in the other eye. Our mother’s other eye, her right one, it was an eye that was missing. The eye’s socket, it was a hollowed-out shell stuffed with mud. Us brothers, we gave each other a look. There was this look that us brothers we sometimes liked to look at each other with this look. It was the kind of look that actually hurt the eyes of the brother who was doing the looking. Imagine that look. Here’s to mud in your eye, Mother, we said. We raised our hands to salute the moon. And then we did with our fish-of-a-mother what every good fisherman will do to a fish when a fish is found washed up dead on the river’s muddy shore. We stuck our dirty boy fingers into our mother, inside our mother’s other eye socket, where there was still an eye inside it, and we plucked out our mother’s marbly-white eye. Us brothers, we could not the two of us decide which one of us would get to do, with this eye, what we both knew the both of us wanted to do. So we fought. We rolled around in the mud, down by the river, our fish-of-a-mother, our mother’s fishy eye, sometimes coming in between us. We fought and we fought and we rolled around in the mud until it was the voice of Girl we heard telling us to stop. We both of us brothers turned because the both of us brothers knew who was doing the telling. It was Girl and not just the voice of Girl telling us brothers to let her settle this between-us brothering. And then it was Girl, it was the hand of Girl, who grabbed our mother’s eye away from our fingers. It was then that Girl bit our mother’s eye in two. Here, Girl said, to us brothers, and she handed each of us brothers one half of our mother’s fish-eyed eye. It was as if Girl was giving to us brothers each one of us half of a moon. Girl said then, Gumball. Then Girl told us to chew. Us brothers, we chewed. We tossed back our mother’s bit-in-two eyeball into our boy mouths. We chewed and we chewed but we did not swallow. Our mother’s eye, our mother — she was a fish, she was a fish eye, that us brothers did not eat. When we were done doing our chewing, we stuck our mother’s chewed-up eyeball onto the bottoms of our muddy boots. Then we clicked our heels three times and walked home from the river, through the mud, into our mother’s kitchen. We walked into our mother’s kitchen. We did not take off our boots.