In a story that comes in under six-hundred words, Christina Berke uses second person to implicate the reader and draw her into the small, beautiful moment of a father and daughter feeding aquarian fish, a moment rendered tragic with a flash forward. Berke then moves the reader seamlessly from the fish-feeding to the narrator’s sister’s car accident, bringing the story full-circle with the last unsettling paragraph.
The back of the tank looks like Mars, magazine photos taped to the back. Sand at the bottom, chunky and blue and white and grey. Maybe you imagine your body tiny enough to feel the grit on the arch of your feet. Maybe that container would be too big.
Your daddy asks if you want to learn how to feed them. He grabs a chair and you hop up, peer inside, the filter gurgling and rattling like he will soon, and the iridescent bodies pop to the surface, mouths open, waiting. The flakes are dumped in, dissolving, before he tells you not to overfeed them, that they could burst. They don’t know when they’ve eaten too much. They will eat and eat and eat until their bodies explode.
He scoops out the excess, green net thick with paste. Try it like this, he says, and gently taps the corner of the bottle into the lid. You try, he says, and you do.
Perfect, he says. Just perfect.
That year, you read poetry in school. You memorize the one about the red fish, the blue fish, the one with the star. When it’s time to recite, you can say the whole book with your bulb eyes closed. The teacher throws a candy at you. You can’t wait for its hard shell to dissolve so you can forget about that night.
Your sister swims in the cooling blue of a summer night sky your father will never know.
Her body in the air, the ocean floor below a thick pavement ready to catch her. The braces he paid for, their work undone in three breaths. Her flesh and teeth and tongue sprinkling like flakes of fish food all across the freeway. He is not there to catch her. Doesn’t say, perfect, just right. Provides no green meshy net to hold her tight.
Below, the cars heave and sigh and honk. Their bodies sitting. Her body splayed.
It’s strange to see time painted that way, draping and shapeless as a fish’s fin fluttering in water, but you aren’t really sure what that means, how time melts, how it’s an illusion. How he can be here one moment, the next gone, the next there that night. A witness said it was an angel. A healer confirms years later— your father was there. It could have been worse, but there he was. The doctor, slitting her blue throat. Your sister, gulping a watery breath. Your father, watching it all.
Every morning the wolf is in the sun, tongue hanging, lapping up the cool crisp air of poetry, of hoetry, of words that fall on their tongue like salt, like marrow from their kill, like a wolf slicing into a rabbit the way you did to me. The way you shrank into yourself, a woodlouse, a wretched creature changing shape: words, voice, future, brain. The turns and roads you missed because first you were supposed to light the car on fire and then you were supposed to get in until it too took us off a cliff to the bottom of the urchin sea.
But where are you now, my beautiful abyss?
Christina Berke is a Chilean-American writer and educator. She’s been supported by Tin House, VONA, Bread Loaf (as the Katharine Bakeless Nason Nonfiction Winner), Sewanee Writers, Juniper, Hedgebrook (as the Carol Shields Residency Fellow), Storyknife, Vermont Studio Center and Ragdale. Her work is in The Sun, Khora, Off Assignment, Teen Vogue and elsewhere. An excerpt of her memoir manuscript, Well, Body, was Longlisted with Disquiet Literary International and the Miami Emerging Writers Contest and a finalist with Fractured Lit. www.christinaberke.com.