Birthmark

Black Sea Bass

 Black Sea Bass It lay in a cooler filled with ice the night we were out of power from the storm. Its skin was gray when I reached inside, not the way I first pulled it from the ocean. Sharp yellow tips of fins stretched as it raised to where my brother & I leaned over the side of a head boat. We were talking about the future. Our other brother was suffering a hangover somewhere in Blacksburg after a week of engineering classes. But we weren’t him, & we didn’t know what it was he really wanted, though for whatever reason, I wish he could have been with us as fish appeared out of nowhere. The storm came through the night & ran a finger along the city’s power lines, as if playing guitar. Primaries snapped loose & danced on sidewalks while the music of fire pounded onto roofs. That morning I went into the backyard, spread a paper covering stories of the storm, smeared scales with a blade and gutted the fish, peeling its hard stomach out. There, as I slit it open, I found three baby crabs it must have swallowed whole, still filled with blue & green bending on their claws. It reminded me of a time my brothers & I had spent on Ocracoke, when we waded in parts of the salt marsh where young blue claws darted out from clouds in the water, their bodies disappearing into the clear, inevitable distance. ...