Filleting a Small Fish—for M. Knife like this, my grandmother says. We are standing over the body of a slick-finned red drum whose insides she is teaching me to navigate but I am far away from here, aboard that vessel on the creased map in your study, inked like fish ribs against the dark vein of the Strait of Gibaltar. I am thinking of all the skeletons that have pressed themselves between the layers of this earth. What I would do to the fossil record if I could. Pay attention to the angle of your blade - There are things I said I'd never do. Leave you at port. Return to this place - wear gumboots, sleep late, lie in wait of what's catching up to me. I am always running my hands over the bones of these metaphors in the absence of skin, imagining scales, what it might feel like to hook my thumb under a spine and lift it cleanly from flesh the way my grandmother can. Like this, she says, just like this, and with her finger to its belly the fish spreads into filets. My eyes silver over from its thick smell. I cannot contain myself - this body. Yours. Cody Klippenstein currently lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest and will be an MFA candidate in fiction at Cornell University this coming fall. Her work has previously appeared in The Malahat Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Joyland and The Fiddlehead, among others. |