Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon Read Online Free PDF Page B

was too far gone to care.
    He awoke some time later. The fading orange sunlight beamed through the windows of the truck. He felt cold anyhow. The creature knelt beside him. It smiled. He did not like that it smiled.
    “Since you helped me, I have helped you,” it said.
    “Helped me how?”
    “I have made you beautiful.”
    The creature held out the driver-side mirror for him to take. It must have crawled out of the truck and broken off the mirror. Jim wondered if anyone saw it. He guessed not. They would’ve shit themselves. No , he realized, they wouldn’t have. They would’ve helped it. Like I did .
    “I don’t want to look,” Jim said. Even as he said it, he was snatching up the mirror. He was still human. He was sure of it. He still felt human. Why should he not look human too?
    In the mirror, staring back at him, he saw the unnamable fish he’d pulled from the sea. The wretched creature he’d tried to help, that now sat there grinning at him like a fucking dummy.
    “Help me,” he said. He said it again and again, louder and louder until he was screaming and thrashing about in the back of the truck, throwing himself against the windows and floor and ceiling, hoping to crush his own skeleton or whatever it was inside that made him so hideous to look upon.
    If someone would just fucking help him.
    Hotel staff and guests began to gather in the parking lot, pointing at the truck. Surely they heard his screams and noticed his thrashing. Why did they not help?
    “Help me.”
    All the while, the firstborn, as he thought of it now, remained completely still beside him, its eyes closed and an atonal thrum emanating from its lips, as if it were meditating.
    “Help me!”
    Then he saw her.
    Jen.
    She said something to the crowd and they shook their heads at her, refusing to help. Alone, carrying their son in her arms, she moved toward the truck. Jen, his sweet and tender wife, had come to help.
    As she lifted the hatch of the camper shell, Jim licked his razor-sharp teeth and opened his blue eyes wide, for best effect. “Help me,” he said to his wife.
    He was ready to return home.





 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    The bass fisherman’s wife was a woman of many social graces. She mounted replicas of his trophy fish, filed the taxes on his tournament winnings, sent Christmas cards to all his sponsors and potential sponsors (and, in an extraordinary display of social grace, also to his competitors), maintained a weekly schedule with her husband’s groomer, tailor, and physical trainer so that he remained viable and appealing to his television show’s audience, hand-fed the bass in their several private ponds treats she home-baked in the shape and texture of lures from his popular lure line so that when he fished the ponds for commercials or live audiences the bass would more readily strike, and yes, it was a lot, and she did so much more. But the bass fisherman’s wife had a secret. When her husband was away for bass fishing tournaments, sometimes going as far as Japan, she would sit in her makeup chair and stare at herself in the wall-sized, three-sided mirror of her private bathroom, in the mansion which had been paid for in full thanks to the extraordinary earnings of her bass fisherman husband’s lure line, which sold well thanks to the voracious appetite of the bass in their private ponds for the baked treats she made in the image of her husband’s lures. She was an accomplished cook—accomplished in everything she had ever attempted—and loved her husband truly. Yet a secret ate at her.
    She sat in her chair now, and she unzipped her human face. Her brown hair and pale bronze skin and perfect teeth and all the softness of her was shed like a snake trading in its old skin as a down payment on new skin so that it might celebrate the forthcoming season in style. But the bass fisherman’s wife wasn’t a snake. No. She was a bass. A Florida strain largemouth, to be exact.