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Jonathan Humphrey

The Fishmonger

Yesterday the fishmonger told me his secret. If the fish aren’t selling, he brings them back to life to keep them fresh. This magic runs in his blood. Literally and figuratively. Learned the way from his father. One inky red drop from a cut, applied at the right spot, at the right time, and the gills tag back in. He’s got the voodoo whittled down to a matter of seconds. A small incision made with a pocketknife on the underside of his left arm. With a nail polish brush from his ex-wife, he gathers enough tawny iron to paint the blush on a toy soldier.

“Each species takes its blood different. I learned on minnows, as they’re the easiest. Hell, you could flick it at them, and they start to wiggling. Real pretty, too, the way that flash of silver leaps back in their bodies. One time my neighbor opened my nose in a fight, and the blood splattered on his old man’s mounted trophy bass. Hours later we heard something like a tiny bell, the tickle of spent fishing hooks in his first cough, and belch after belch smelling of stale water. That thing cracked itself in two trying to come off the wall. That was early. Soon I tried my hand at catfish, with a thin line of blood on their white bellies. You have to slap them across the face to get them to come to. They don’t take kindly to that. I can relate. Yeah. I reckon sea critters are the hardest. Shrimp are small, but tricky. Have to dip each toe. I play them fancy classical music and it speeds things up. And tuna. You have to kiss tuna. You put the blood on like lipstick and plant three wet ones on their stiff mouths. Gentle giants, I’d say. Or maybe they like the way I kiss.”

The fishmonger reached into his shirt pocket for a hand rolled cigarette and lit it, breathing out the smoke, staring off into the mackerel clouds.

“And sometimes you get attached. You can’t help it. It makes the killing that much harder. But I ain’t selling sushi, you know. Not the living kind, anyhow.”

undertow
the gymnastics
of a dead crab

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About the Author

Jonathan Humphrey’s work has recently appeared in Acorn, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, and The Heron’s Nest. With a fondness for whiskey and whippoorwills, he divides his time between the lights of Nashville and the woods of his native Kentucky.