The hook—

The summer was hot, and the worms my father had me gather for him in my gleeful toddler mud-rolls were as thick as my pudgy fingers. I remember crying when he impaled them on the glaring light of his fishhook. I watched them spasm with the shock of steel and had to turn my head away, only looking back once my father had thrust the corpse and murder weapon into the wide river that stretched across our property. We caught eels all summer long and sold them at the market. In later years, he let me help catch catfish. I loved the funny look on their faces. He always wanted to catch a perch and show it off. He called the one in our river by my grandmother’s name, but only before we had to wrap her up and put her in a box. He put a fishhook on my bedroom door, said when I grew so tall that I could reach it, it would be mine. When I grew so tall that I could reach it, I slipped the hook into the black bag my grandmother left me. I never remembered to use that hook before I left for college, and now I’ll never get to fish with it at all.

The insides—

In the coolness of his kitchen I watched the fishmonger open up the perch. It came from downstream, where the fishmonger’s cousin lived. The river ran through everyone’s families. With a wet thud, the fishmonger slid a scaled fish onto the cutting board. He cut down the side, peeled back the skin and laid it to the side. His wife uses the scales in the jewelry she makes out of broken fishhooks and bent spoons. He sliced away at the sides of the fish. He let me look inside its body sometimes, to see the way the insides were arranged. He set those aside too, after he cut them away. I remembered the fishmonger years later when I opened a sick fish and the insides were all the wrong shape. From him I learned: you never know when you might need fish guts. Even now, when none of the fish I touch have ever seen the river, I save what I can. In case I ever need them.

The jars—

Above my bed in my first apartment I had a shelf of keepsakes. My university friends thought that I was morbid, keeping jam jars of eel eyes and lungfish lungs and clipped catfish barbels and drowned worms. It was something from home, I would always explain. Something to remind me of home. My aunt sent me jars and jars of jam after date season ended, and I couldn’t bring myself to throw the jars away. Like fish guts, like jars, I supposed, pulling the jars from my black bag and arranging them neatly. When my first girlfriend and I had sex in the apartment, we stayed out of the bedroom on her request. She didn’t want the dead to look her in the face as we fucked. One night she forgot about the dead fish in jars and as I arched up, I hit my head on the shelf and the shards of the dead got tangled with the glass in my hair that cut my shoulders and my collarbones and my eyes burned and I bled all over her bare chest.

The heart—

The lab component of Gen Bio was my favorite. My lab partner was conveniently sick on dissection days, leaving me alone with whatever body we were to desecrate. One week I was handed the smallest perch I had ever seen, and I laughed as the TA passed it into my tray and kept walking. The class peered at me, perplexed, but moved on. I tied back my braids with a rubber band and breathed in. The formaldehyde smell was wrong with the perch in front of me. I expected sharp stainless-steel air and the slice of salt and the edge of decay. My scalpel was too small in my hands; this fish deserved a bigger knife. In the front of the lab, the professor made her incisions. I made my own. Quiet, precise. I peeled back the skin, set it aside. A cut across the underside. My hand up to the ribs, my probe and pins forgotten. The heart of the perch in my fist. The professor was impressed by my work when she came around to my lab station. The organs were arranged neatly, and the flesh was piled beside it. The wet spine was unnerving, and I spent the rest of the period surgically rending every scrap of pickled flesh from the ribs. When I had finished, the bell was about to ring. I slipped my black bag over my shoulder and slipped the heart back into the bare maw of the spine.

The wine—

For my twenty-first birthday, my father took me fishing on the part of the river that barricades my uncle’s property, and he taught me which wines go with eel. I sat on the bank with my bare feet in the river and for once my father didn’t tell me off. I pulled up a worm from the mud and held it out to him. He handed me the fishing pole and said that he’d cook dinner. He leaned over and gripped the riverbank with his fingers, watched the river yield up my birthday present. The first fish I hauled up was a perch with a conspicuous bite in its side. It was the last perch the river would give me, and someone else had already gotten to it first. He made me throw it back. My uncle’s kitchen was warmer than the fishmonger’s, and my father’s fingers less steady with the knife. He went to throw out the skin, but I took it aside. He let me pour the wine over the eel’s body, both libation and marinade. After dinner, I asked my uncle what wine goes with perch and he handed me a very small bottle, which I stowed in my shoulder bag. My father was unsteady with the flaying knife and eelflesh spotted the eelskin. I soaked the skin in wine, tied it in a knot, and tossed it to the river. I closed my eyes and gripped the riverbank and felt the grateful snap of jaws.

The spices—

When my family insisted on coming to dinner at my first house, I made fish. I don’t remember what kind it was, it wasn’t local. The river had been sick that year and the families all knew it. I cooked with whatever I had brought from home when I first moved out. My father had pressed the coriander into my hand as I crossed the threshold of the dorms. The night they came, I was stressed near out of my head. For a second, as they sat down and pressed their forks through the flesh on the porcelain, I wondered if I’d prepared the preserved fish I took home from the university lab. I thought I would have noticed while I was preparing it, the wrong-smell of keeping death fresh that not even my shiny silver kitchen could disguise. The spices might have done a better job of hiding the sick scent. I wondered if the sick river smelled like death kept fresh but knew better than to ask as pink flesh met white teeth.

The salt—

Once I moved out of the river’s range, I kept dried fish in the cellar for the winter. The fishmonger had shown me how, when I dropped by his store midway through university and collapsed in a heap in his sharp-smelling kitchen. He told me about the rivers freezing over, about the fish that run as far as they can away from the chill. He took one of my father’s fish from his icebox and sliced it open and swore me to smugness and vaguery. He prepped it like my birthday fish, with the spices and wine, but he drowned it in salt after that. The fishmonger hauled a slab of crystal white up onto the countertop and spread out the fishflesh on top. He sliced off the top layer of the salt brick and put it with the fish into an unlit stone oven. He told me he would wait until he needed fish, and then he would eat it from the dry oven, chew it like rawhide and let its past wake up on the tongue. With plenty of water, he told me. The jerky he gave me went into my bag. I ran back to the river on that trip home and dove in and slept for a while there or maybe I dreamed it. I was in the sea and the salt washed off me and I sank.

The stuffing—

The woman who insisted that she was my best friend for more years than perch usually live made the best stuffing I had ever tasted. She brought me to her foster shelter one winter holiday and the kids all asked about the fishhook tattoo that curled over my lips and my maxilla to the edge of my left nostril. I told them stories about the river. I think about those kids and wonder who will take in all the orphaned fish. One of the kids said she was born on the river too and held up a hand with a score of tiny hook-scars. She learned to fish when her father thought she was the son to save his family from the river’s disease. I brought dried fish from my cellar and we shared it in a corner of the room while the company stuffed their faces. The fishergirl smiled wide around the jerky and told me it was too much cinnamon and not enough clove in the marinade. I undid one of my braids and pressed the fishbone beads into her palms. She’d grown up further downriver and told me about walking south to the city; her family couldn’t float with the current like mine. But, she countered, she could get home on the river, while I had to walk along the bank in the twilight. She was a year from being out of the foster system, my friend told me at the end of the evening. My friend had the adoption papers in her bag, and I’ve not been more grateful since for the stuffing and sheaf in my black shoulder bag. My daughter and I filled my house with the river’s presence as it died miles away. She moved out and back to the river five years later, but for the anniversary she sent me scale-and-bone jewelry made by the fishmonger’s wife. Slim pickings this season, she wrote.

The wrappings—

When I came home for the river’s burial my daughter’s boyfriend served me fish cloaked in banana leaves. The river and the sea, I told them, joining their hands. My daughter laughed, and the young man exhaled. I kept the banana leaves after dinner was over. Like fish guts, like leaves. My daughter lives in my father’s house. I sat at the riverbank and submerged my digits in the dry indents my daughter’s fingers have left in the dirt. The river shied away from the soles of my feet. Like when I was little, I pointed my toes, and they just barely touched the surface. I sat by the river for a good long while. My daughter’s boyfriend washed the plates, came out with a dishtowel in his hands to sit beside me. He told me about the rivers that run down. My daughter said over breakfast that the river will dry up soon. She said first die the fish and then dies the water. Her boyfriend said that the sea will be lonely. I went into my father’s room and gave my daughter a strip of linen for the handfasting. Rivers are bound to the sea.

The box—

Before the river dries, I take my father’s tackle-box to the bank and scoop the water in. I have my bag with me. The river is family, and I will bury it like my grandmother. The hook has been made small by my anxious and growing hands, and it soaks in the sun as it sinks into the box. The fish guts my daughter learned to save go in next. The shards of glass are still a powdered red, and the tendril of pain permeates the water as they pass through. The preserved heart I didn’t cook for dinner is marinated in wine, and the water darkens. Coriander seeds slant like pearls and get caught in the aorta. Chips of fish jerky salt the water, and the stuffing is hardtack; from the year I brought my daughter home. In the folds of the banana leaves, I nestle the fishwife’s jewelry. I tie it with a linen band and bury the river under my young and restless palms.