act for Mr. Martinez, I placed him on a shelf above the cremation desk, where he joined the line of brown plastic soldiers, dutifully waiting for someone to come to claim them. Satisfied at having done my job and taken a man from corpse to ash, I left the crematory at five p.m., covered in my fine layer of people dust.
THE THUD
T hey say the way to figure out your porn-star name is to combine the name of your first childhood pet with the name of the street you grew up on. By that rule, my porn-star name would be Superfly Punalei. I have no intention of pursuing a career in pornography, but the name is almost reason enough to try.
Punalei Place is the small cul-de-sac in Kaneohe, Hawai’i, where I spent the first eighteen years of my life. My house was average at best, but due to its location on a tropical island it had the good fortune of being flanked on one side by an epic mountain range and on the other by a sparkling blue bay. You had to sprint up the front walkway during coconut season lest an overripe coconut hurl itself down onto your head.
In its languid stillness, Punalei Place was like a warm bath that never cooled. Everything would go on forever as it always had been: the pickup trucks with the feathered warrior heads hanging from their rearview mirrors, the local plate-lunch restaurants serving teriyaki beef next to macaroni salad, ukuleles strumming their steady drone on the island music radio station. The air was thicker than it should be, and never ranged far from the same temperature as your body.
Superfly arrived from Koolau Pet Store when I was five years old, carried in a plastic bag of filtered water. He lived in my dining room in a blue tank with orange gravel. My parents named him Superfly after the title of the Curtis Mayfield hit, but it’s doubtful my fish experienced the hustlin’ times and ghetto streets described in the song.
Shortly after coming to live at Punalei Place, Superfly developed Ichthyophthirius multifiliis . Known as “ich” or “ick” in the aquarium trade, the parasite promises a slow aquatic death. White spots started spreading over Superfly’s scales. His once-playful swimming slowed to a pathetic float. One morning, after weeks of his color rinsing from brilliant gold to dull white, he ceased to swim at all. My mother awoke to find his tiny corpse floating in the tank. Not wanting to alarm me, she decided to put off her daughter’s first mortality conversation until returning home from work that afternoon.
Later my mother sat me down, solemnly grabbing my hand. “Sweetie, there’s something I have to tell you about Superfly.”
“Yes, Mother?”
I probably called her Mom or Mommy, but in my memories I’m a very polite British child with exquisite manners.
“Superfly got sick, which made him die. I saw this morning that he wasn’t alive anymore,” she said.
“No, Mother. That’s not right,” I insisted. “Superfly is fine.”
“Honey, I’m sorry. I wish he wasn’t dead, but he is.”
“Come look, you’re wrong!”
I led my mother over to Superfly’s tank, where a motionless white fish floated near the surface. “Look, Caitlin, I’m going to give him a poke, to show you what I mean, OK?” she said, lifting the top.
As she brought her finger down to touch the little carcass, Superfly shot forward, swimming across the tank to escape the jabbing human.
“Jesus Chri—!” she squealed, watching as he swam back and forth, very much alive.
This is when she heard my father laughing behind her.
“John, what did you do?” she said, clutching her chest.
What my father had done was wake up slightly later than my mother, drink his usual cup of coffee, and then unceremoniously dispose of Superfly in the toilet. He took me back to Koolau Pet Store to purchase a healthy white fish of exact Superfly dimensions. This new fish came home and plopped into the blue plastic tank, the sole purpose of its short fish life to give my mother a heart
Rhonda Gibson, Winnie Griggs, Rachelle McCalla, Shannon Farrington