The Long Fin
He tells her he loves her, he lights a candle she cannot reach, and hopes he at least finds her soon enough to save her lousy kitchenette. She seems to enjoy it quite a bit.
His father was coming or going down Rockwell, past the infant pilates studio, over the rail tracks, across the diner. He lost sight of him before the intersection hit, but understood the length of his pace. A wasp was caught mummified in the soft net of doily curtains, he acknowledged it. The brown line sputtered from Western, what’d it be like to race a car from a carriage? Funny, sure, he’d bet. His father’d left a paper bag of sausages on the counter, all franks, no mustard, and he wouldn’t like to move it quite yet, the thought of it haunted, for what if the Western bound train went North, suddenly? The sausages would do what they were supposed to do, congeal and provide a clear anamnesis of the Last Visit. The leaving, the warm shoulder, the spiral decline of footsteps. The men weren’t particularly close in practice. They preferred not to cross gazes in favor of reclusive observation. He’d wonder after him fondly. His smallness, the crepe of his hands, his blueness in glee, his oddity. He boiled one frank in salted water and left the rest.
‘There’s not much to see here, usually,’ the woman in smocks tapped the edge of the aquarium, slack jawed, ‘The real pretty ones die quickest, you know. Due to their exotic-ness.’ She leaned her elbow to the plastic cart slinging 80 gallons of water. It wasn’t not flirtatious.
‘Sure, fine,’ he said, ‘a small lifeless one, then, please.’ He followed her lead, tapped on the glass over an orange-and-grey sardine-looking thing with a bulged eyeball. The woman narrowed her eyes, then softened as she pulled a net from the deep pocket of her utility smock.
‘Fine, just fine choice, it’s a baby boy betta.’ She said. ‘They largely die due to starvation, so wise up. See?’ She pointed at the flailing, gasping fish hovering above the tank. Its mouth, a compressed pore. ‘Cut up blood worms. Dead ones, or you’ll need epinephrine.’
Fine, just fine, he hummed with the fry to his chest. Like a warm water bottle. A fish in a bag. He knew it’d die. It wasn’t out of spite. The tanks ran two-hundred dollars without accessories or fluoride or whatever the hell the smock waggled in front of him at checkout. A cock-shaped vase on the sausage counter with distilled water to dilute the faucet’s hardness. Seashells. Frozen peas cut by teeth. He placed the vase on the opposite burner while he heated a frying pan for lunch.
His mother sat in the dark kitchenette, yellow-haired with her teeth resting on her knee. The bathroom faucet steamed furnace runoff into the hall, he removed his glasses and rubbed them on his pant leg, dismayed by her duskiness. She lit a candle and pressed herself to him a moment, then passed into the hall, the restroom. He stood to the side and asked, ‘Would you need any assistance?’ Though he knew it was not loud enough for her to hear. The little kitchen was unfamiliar to him and made him feel like an intruder, this careening elderly woman with not so much a mallet to defend herself, who couldn’t turn her neck more than twenty degrees on even the most horrific instinct. He wobbled and sniffed and judged, not realizing until his mother exited a pitch black room that the lights were not off by choice, but cut off by overdue billing. ‘Who was meant to take care of this for you?’ He asked before she had reclaimed her seat. She looked off and out into spacetime. ‘Here, the matches,’ he reached and grasped the air in front of her. He lit the stove and put on the kettle. He pulled her chair closer to the stove. ‘Warm, yes? Better?’ She smiled pitifully and he wanted to scorch her wig clean off. ‘Has he called you up recently? At all this month, ma?’ He insisted the censure release him and seize her husband instead. ‘He loves you so massively,’ she says. ‘And I hope he’s never to find you again.’ She refuses his money and he refuses to leave it anyway. He tells her he loves her, he lights a candle she cannot reach, and hopes he at least finds her soon enough to save her lousy kitchenette. She seems to enjoy it quite a bit.
His father hadn’t completed a legal adoption of any sort, but he was a grown man and needn’t the registered affirmation of care. He held no capital, no holdings, no endowments, it was not for paucity of faith, no bitterness, he was unclad before his nascent son, to offer was Saturday breakfast and occasional comments on the whoriness of women today. The former far more significant. The Rockwell diner was dim and Pabst-laden, with occasional live performances by the yuppies of yesteryear. He’d order grits subbed for toast, and they’d arrive in a plastic deli cup with paper salt parcels. He’d eat, they’d both, quietly. His father’s favorite waitress began handing off their table to her manager. She was young and her freckles were mounds on her shoulders. She’d stand and sulk and pretend not to keep tabs on their table. She chewed pens. Once, she gnawed the ink all down her chin and spent the remainder of her shift weeping at the bar. His father left a few bills on the table with his telephone number in case she needed to talk. It was not the first time.
‘Why’d you gotta press her like that?’ He asked, watched him swallow a few times too many, folded the skin of his neck below his collar, tucked it in. ‘Baby teeth,’ he said. ‘She’s trying to wiggle one out.’ He didn’t look up at her again, but as they exited, he watched the waitress. She tugged her apron loose, revealing an umbonation. Maybe.
He’d been away a while, maybe forty hours. The apartment reeked. The fry swam vertically, alive, agitated. The sausages had slicked the table in oil. Answering machine full, local politics, promotions, CIPSCO. Halos on the backsplash, lobster bib fluttering from the cabinet, pink mold mouth sores in the sink. He flicked the radio, WNIB-FM, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, split peas to vase, mechanics rag to countertop. The wasp had hollowed enough to slip from its tomb. Sad clarinet. Rockwell train to Western, snow rails slick, quiet. His father was perfectly far enough. He’d left southwest. It wasn’t just girls. He’d thought as much. He had plugs, after all. It doesn’t take a real idiot, just a simple one.