Abandoned Fish

By Kristin Dober

This Story Was an Honorable Mention in Our Contest

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He drove past the old bait shop on his way to the hospital after he got the phone call. The nurse explained there was no one else, and that time was short; it was the right thing to do. He almost didn’t go, and he certainly didn’t stop as he passed the dilapidated, yellow building where he spent his formative years. He turned his head to look. The hole in the roof was familiar, dark and gaping.

Yellow. He hated that color. It looked sickly, like something went terribly wrong. Why his father painted the walls of their little bait shop this horrid, putrid shade, he would never understand. It was the opposite of appetizing, which somehow made the process of gutting fish every day even more burdensome. He remembered those early mornings well; when the sun came burning through the aluminum blinds, bent out of shape from too many curious, feral cats. He stood next to him, barely tall enough to see over the wet, wooden slab, watching and holding a dirty plastic bucket while he took his knife to a glassy eyed mackerel, or if it was a good day, a gleaming red snapper.

He often wished for some sage advice from his father in these moments, something like old fisherman’s wisdom, but words were seldom said. Usually it was an odd grunt, or a quiet mumble about the DNR and its oppressive rules. Mostly it was wet, slopping guts being thrown around. Then, when the bin was full, and the fish were on ice, he would take the bucket and scoop up their insides so he could portion them into small mason jars for tourists and anyone else who accidentally came by.

That September, at barely fourteen, he sat on the floor across from his father, and they listened to the weatherman on the radio. He sounded panicked. Twenty-foot swells, storm surge, one hundred-mile-per-hour winds.

“Should we go?” he asked his father that evening, anxious.

“No,” he said, stubborn and final, sitting in his dark brown armchair with an empty bottle of whiskey resting by his boots. For better or worse, there was no follow up discussion.

The two of them never recovered from that devastation, or from his father’s lack of concern for either of their futures. Still, he pressed on in spite of him. He kept going because after his mother never came home, there was no other choice. He made something of himself. Twenty years later, he taught his own son the why and how of preparing fish, so people came from out of town specifically for what they caught together, knowing it would be fresh and fairly priced. He listened to the weatherman when he spoke about wind and swells and surge. He avoided brown liquor and yellow walls.

Standing in the doorway of the sterile, dingy room under the green hospital lights, his father looked exactly like he remembered—older, weathered, and with the whites of his eyes as yellow as those old walls. They stared at each other silently. He always hated that color.