Catfish

PawPaw brings a chill after the wood door closes. He holds two paper bags full of catfish wrapped in newspaper, the weather report for Shreveport nearly washed out by the damp fish, plump-bellied, their narrow faces shimmering in death. We are hungry. We are ready to consume.

Who will clean the fish, I ask, though I already know the answer. NaNa will do it. She does so many things too well, the work of her hands, quick and brutal, how she scrapes the pearlized scales that fly like a frisbee. One pops me in the eye. I laugh at its hardness, like plastic. Like a cut fingernail. Like family, its pain is inferior to its beauty. When NaNa is not looking I touch the eye of the fish. It jiggles beneath my finger and sparkles like a jewel. NaNa’s butcher’s knife slices the belly of the fish. With one clean slit, the flesh breaks, then the tough, outer skin. It sounds like metal. Touching the eye has made me kin to this body we will eat. What did the fish believe as it breathed its last? Was it ready?

NaNa asks me to take the corn meal, lard, and Lawry’s from the cabinet, stained yellow from her cooking and cigarette smoke. This request says she forgives me for some unnameable thing I did the night before. What, I don’t remember. I could have looked wrong or rolled my eyes. I could have said the word lie, a profanity in this house. Perhaps I swept the top of her foot, shiny with Vaseline, a costly accident, something to beware of, a tale passed down from enslaved African mothers. I make a salad of iceberg, tomato and cucumber. She nods approval to the dish. I know this ritual. When it is time to eat, we pray. After fights, we eat.

Every shut eye ain’t sleep, so the saying goes. Every shut eye ain’t dead is another saying. Ask the fish, born without eyelids. Eyes open. Eyes closed. There is no choice. When your body is necessary for a girl and her great-grandmother to say I love you, you learn the pulse of sacrifice. What it needs. The hunger it kills.