We Make Mud

Fish Heads: Revisited

One day, us brothers, we get it into our boy heads to go with our hammers out back into the back of our yard, out back to where our fish-headed telephone pole is back there studded with the chopped off heads of fish. Back here we go with our hammers but not with our fists filled with rusty, bent-back nails, and here we start to unhammer and unnail, from this backyard pole, all of those fish heads that have been hammered and nailed into this telephone pole’s wood. There are exactly one hundred and fifty fish heads hammered and nailed into that pole’s creosoted wood, and so we take all one hundred and fifty of those fish heads down from where they have been hammered, and we put these fish, these fish heads, into our mud-rusty buckets and go — us brothers, we run with our buckets, one bucket hanging low off of each one of us brothers’ arms, we go with these buckets filled up to their rims, we run ourselves down to the river, and one by one, fish head by fish head, we throw each one of these fishes’ heads back into the river’s muddy water. Fish, we say to these fish heads. Go back where you belong. Us brothers, we watch these fish heads float away and down the river, one by one they bob and they drift away on their way out to the lake, though when we get down to the last two fish, us brothers, we do not want to let these fishes go. We hold onto these last two fish, these last two of our fish heads, and we give each other this look. There is this look that us brothers, we like to look at each other with this look. This look, it’s the kind of a look that actually hurts the face of the brother who is doing the looking. Imagine that look. It’s while us brothers are looking at each other with this looking look that, out of the corners of each one of our eyes, the eyes of us brothers that are facing the river, us brothers, this is what we see: we see fish, we see fish heads, that have turned back into fish: fish with fish bodies and fish with fish fins and fish with fish tails to go along with their fish heads. These fish, they are swimming back upriver to where us brothers, we are standing, there on the river’s muddy edge, and these fish, they are flopping themselves down into the mud that is muddy in and on and around our boot’s feet. These fish, they are looking up at us brothers, up from this mud, with a fishy look on their fish faces that tells us brothers, Take us, brothers, home. Put us fishes back in our place. Nail us fishes back up and back into that back-of-the-yard pole. Us brothers, we give each other the look. We nod at each other with our boy heads. These fish, Brother says. These fish are keepers, Brother says. If you say so, I say to Brother. And then, fish by fish, brother by brother, us brothers, we fish our hands into our trouser pockets, we fish our knives up out of our pockets, we take each of us brothers turns cutting off, fish by fish, fish head by fish head, each of these fishes’ heads.