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4

    Quinn
    A fish market is a holy place. People who come from near the sea know this and my smartass people were ocean-side flotsam for certain. I grew up with my mother in Mystic, Connecticut. My grandfather was a biologist at Woods Hole. Year-round beach dwellers who weathered the winters and paid for pumps when basements got flooded.
    Deep’s Fish Market is in a puny building on the harbor. It’s webbed over with fishing nets, skewered buoys stuck in there. A bell jangles when you open the door.
    “Good day, sir!” I say to Billy, who rules the big glass shop counter. He’s only seventeen and it’s a marvel to see how well he plays the man. He wears a yellow slicker, necessary on rainy days but today an affectation. There’s an odor of damp flannel from where Billy is sweating under the arms.
    “Good day to you!” he says, smiley. A good smile, even though one of his canine teeth has fallen back and overlapped with its neighbor. Billy Deep has inky-black hair and the pale skin of the drowned. I bet his father tried to put him back the day he was born. In a fishing family, skin like that is bad luck for certain.
    Billy says, “We have a special on Glidden Points. Came in this morning. D’you know what oysters do to a lady?”
    Billy jokes because he knows he doesn’t have a chance. It was the first time I came in with Rosie that did it. She was in the corner, quietly talking to the lobsters in the burbling tank. We were beaming at her, Billy and I, like she was the most wonderful thing we’d ever seen. Billy caught me staring, staring like he was staring, and just like that he understood he wasn’t my type.
    So now we have our rapport. This is what happens to boys once they realize they’re not getting in your pants: they get fun to be around.
    “Don’t need any oysters, Billy.”
    “Well, then take some flounder and be done with it.”
    I watch him cut the floppy white meat into fillets. As he cuts, his gloves wrinkle. The tacky rubber cuff tugs at the dark hairs near his wrist. The slabs of fish are lined up like gems on the ice inside a case. The tuna is red and translucent as a drop of blood. The swordfish is more opaque, purplish and obscene. There’s a halibut that hasn’t been boned yet, its wobbly dead eye still intact. Something happens, not in the eye itself, but somewhere deeper inside, when a fish dies. You’ve seen it happen if you’ve ever watched one flop around a dock until it’s dead. Some brightness or intelligence fades. I saw this happen to my mother. This very same thing.
    There are plenty of examples to take from ocean beasts, if you’re willing to look for them. My biologist grandfather specialized in photosynthetic plankton, which seemed infinitely less glamorous than the toothy sharks and blunt-headed belugas in the aquarium. But he showed me maps of how deep the ocean was and how only the smallest percentage of that was surface. He told me how it was the plankton grew green there and could catch the sun. This was what whales ate. Those minuscule creatures wound up in a whale’s belly and made for enough nutrition to keep its lumbering heart beating.
    Billy wraps the flounder in white paper and tapes the package closed. “Here you go. Hope your girl appreciates this.”
    Rosie always appreciates dinner. She usually says, “I used to go swimming with this?”
    Rosie and I can share these small things, and I make sure to appreciate them. I turn them over in my mind real slow. I know it doesn’t sound like much to go on, but I tell myself that if I lump all these small things together, they might add up to something. If I keep it up, they just might be enough to feed my big old Monstro heart.
    A T HOME , I throw the fish down and say, “I’m making dinner.” But Rosie says she isn’t hungry. She says, “Let’s go to the bar.”
    The Monkey’s Uncle is the sort of place where people are drinking for a reason. There’s no one waffling between cocktail options