Fish Cheeks

by Priya Ele

“When you love someone I know something bad is going to happen to them,” Nick tells me, his face warm and coated with a bovine sensibility, pink and sacrificial, like lambskin or oxblood.

“That sounds horrible.” I say, even though it doesn’t really, it means little. We’re sitting on my bedroom floor and watching The Sopranos and he’s talking about my allurement with doomed HBO characters. I’m fixated on the small dogs and the girlfriends and the chlorinated shine of their faces, marbled with vanity and naivety. He smiles like I’ve said something funny, then asks me,

“Isn’t that scary?”

Later, we walk between the water and the FDR, drinking salt-colored wine out of paper cups and watching pets scatter over the blacktop. He talks to me about music. I’m quiet and trying to figure out when we’ll have sex again, and what that would mean, plainly, as if that’s all some arithmetic I can solve in my head. I look at his fingers which appear warped and overdefined, it suddenly makes sense to me that artists have trouble drawing hands and that AI images can never place the right amount of fingers in their right places.

“I saw him as a baby, I saw him grow old, and then I saw him die,” Nick says, on a new subject now. “And I’m still virtually the same as I was at the beginning. In the grand scheme of how long humans live, I mean.”

He’s talking about his dead cat. He lights a cigarette dry-mouthed. I feel him be satisfied with my quiet, as if his words have offered me something great and monumental. I close my eyes and listen to the rotten turned-over noise of my own breathing. Since I’ve learned what the death rattle is I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ve convinced myself that its sound exists in everything, the movement of keys, the angling of trains, the bathing of pillowcases in hot water and laundry soap. It sounds like the impending and the unwanted, and all I ever think about are the things I want and the things that will happen, speaking of, Nick puts his hand on my shoulder. When I open my eyes, we’re both watching the fishermen on the side of the East River. A man wrestles a hook out of a fish mouth, all slick and tarnishing and painfully alive. He’s using so much force that I imagine the small animal vertebrae cracking in descending fragments. His hands are covered in anamniotic blood, red and oily.

“Do you find this cruel?” Nick asks me.

“Find what cruel?” I try, vaguely, not feeling strongly either way; and then I see that he’s not looking where I am, and is instead studying my face, and is likely asking me something about me, or us, or whatever. I imagine the weight of his hands around my skull being something as off-balanced as the fisherman’s to his catch. The circumference of his fingers like a metal hook, my own mouth gauged and bleeding. Questions like that aren’t the sort of questions I try to answer. I know better. So I smile, as if everything is very funny and very easy for me. I suck the inside of my mouth, tasting spit and carbon and blood, playing mysterious, playing plain.

Priya Ele is a writer from New Jersey. She is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at Columbia University. She also lived in Ireland for a little while.