Fish and Sin

Some rivers bend from sight or burn down to nothing but fossils and dust. With this kind of loss, it's hard to lay blame. My mother used to say we were tied to water. Even Jesus, she said, fed the multitudes with fish, and called Peter a fisher of men. Every Friday, I was too scared to eat, sure stigmata would blossom from the sole she served with a tartar sauce so bitter from lemon it would scorch my mouth and turn it into the cave where an ex-priest ate the bones of fish he caught to atone for the desperate sins he imagined when in the parish he was the star of every confession he heard. I'd hide the fish in napkins, stock up on potatoes and green beans, and excuse myself after dessert to slip the accursed fish into the compost where strays fed. Even now, the thought of fish is enough to make me cringe and believe I must not be saved. Nothing nets bring out of water can bless this world where rivers die and what's left in water's absence could be dull salt and the despair of insects. Deep in the compost, larvae hatched and burrowed towards a vague memory of fish stink and sin. Adult by the time they broke through decay to the air, they followed what was left of a dying river and fed swallows for miles. Or ended up in the carcasses of fish too small to be kept. Fishing is an art, and a pleasure. But it's hard to believe pleasure is all it's cracked up to be, or even close to enough to comfort the priest who cracked under the pressure of all that flesh that kept begging for absolution. I'd like to find the cave with what's left of that penitent confessor, tell the bones the color of salt everything.