The Fish Whisperer’s Daughter

THE FISH WHISPERER'S DAUGHTER

by Karla Tiffany

Content Warnings: Reference to corporal punishment, parental separation

“The trick to gettin’ the stains out is rinsin’ the scales off first,” Mama began as she wrapped her pruney fingers around the tilapia’s tail and cradled it while she walked over to the sink. Our sink wasn’t nothing much—the faucet creaked each time we used it and no matter how hard Mama made me scrub, I couldn’t get the stains out. But let the fish tell it, and you’d think it was one of those stainless steel resorts boasting water that gets hot on a dime and a separate bowl just for body scrubs. At least, that’s how they saw it when Mama worked her magic. 

“See,” Mama smiled, “you run your hands down its body like this.” The tilapia’s scales popped up row by row behind her palm like clockwork as the water weaved around and between them, forming tiny canals. 

“Ooooh,” the fish cooed and purred, as it writhed gently in Mama’s hands. 

“There you go now,” Mama whispered. Its bones cricked and cracked until the pressure melted away like butter. “That’s how you do it. Just like Big Mama taught me. God rest her soul.” Mama closed her eyes. Placing a hand on her chest, Mama took a breath so deep you’d think she was trying to swallow Big Mama whole, as if she could trap the woman in her lungs. 

But she could never hold her long. That’s just how Big Mama was. Auntie Junie called her a rolling stone. 

Mama was different. She gave everybody her time. People, pets, fish—they were all the same to her. After Big Mama’s funeral, Auntie Junie said Mama had finally found inner peace, which basically meant Mama stopped yelling at Daddy for being out late, and laughing at my knock-knock jokes, and drowning her pillow in tears as I tip-toed to the kitchen for a late-night snack. 

“Just forget it,” I said. “I’ll never get it right!” 

“See, now that’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout.” Mama’s fishy hands clasped my bony shoulders and spun me round. The salty odour wafted up to my eyes, blurring them as they swam upstream against the wrinkles in her sleeves and floated through the folds in her mahogany neck, coming back into focus just in time to drown in the dark bogs she called pupils. “Girl, you got too much sense to let that foolishness fill up your head.” 

She rapped on the side of my skull and the echo vibrated deep down in my bones as she lumbered out the kitchen. Whenever I knocked on a tree like that, all I’d hear is the solid clunk of wood beneath my fist. It was the same with Mama. She never made an echo—she was too grounded for that. Nothing could uproot her. As for me? The wind bent me any which way it pleased like a reed. But Mama kept propping me up and fertilizing me all the same. 

Every Sunday, as far back as I could remember, Mama plopped me in front of that rickety old sink and taught me how to get the stains out of fish. She had the lesson down to a science. The pep talk, the demonstration, the soothing tone—she never deviated from the steps of her ritual, never raised her voice, never gave up on me. 

If repetition were key, I’d be fish whispering with the best of them, but I wasn’t like Mama.

•••

 I’d seen the best of her—the part she kept hidden—with my own eyes when I was just eight years old. Back then, the boogeyman still kicked and growled from under my bed, sending my feet scurrying across the knotted floor to my parents’ door. Only one night they weren’t there. All that remained was an open window and the ghost of the wind.

As I crept back down the hall dodging the cracks in the floor, a low rumble washed over the walls and I could hear the pitter-patter of water skating off rocks and plip-plopping into a flowing stream. Its sandy banks led me straight to the kitchen and that’s when I saw her. Hunched over the sink like a new mother safeguarding her only child, Mama was humming a sweet lullaby as she caressed a fish I’d never seen before. And when the moonlight shone through the window just right, its scales gleamed a dazzling shade of blue from a sky long ago. 

Like most Mamas on our block, my Mama worked two jobs to keep a roof over our head. But unlike the other Mamas, my Mama—aching bones, red eyes, and all—gave each fish the time it deserved. I watched as she probed the fish’s body with the balls of her fingertips, searching for knots, orbs of tension from years of evading nets and little boys and their jagged rocks and the six-pack rings that snoozing men forgot to cut up and the sharks—oh, the sharks—and the oil spills that pushed the fish further and further from her partner until she forgot her way home. 

Mama worked slowly, taking it all in, kneading the fish’s hurting places, wiping the tears from the fish’s eyes as she squeezed out all the bad—oozing, burbling black globs of anxiety and pain—until the fish let out a final heavy sigh and there was nothing left— 

—but the magic of Mama. 

A ball of iridescent blue light rose from the sink and exploded into tiny streams that swirled and whirled all over the room. A wayward streak ricocheted off Mama’s hanging cast-iron skillet and would’ve hit me square in the eye had I not stumbled and hit the floor—with a thud! Not that it mattered. Mama couldn’t hear nothing anyhow with all that light whirring round her ears, enveloping her body and causing her hair to stand on end from headwrap to weary slippers. The light disappeared as quickly as it started, sopped up by her skin like runaway gravy. Mama stumbled over to the nearest chair and fell back with a splash. 

As she sat there gazing up, fatigue hooked itself into the corners of her mouth, deflating her lips until they hung so low they formed a sunken smile. Gasping for air, water weeped from her pores, pooling on the ground beneath her and covering the tiled floor. Before I knew it, I was in the kitchen. But my hurried steps did more than wet my feet; they sent a wave of ripples hurtling toward Mama, and like a drowning, possessed woman she let out a deep gurgle from the pit of her throat that sent me gliding back to the far more comforting arms of the boogeyman under my bed. Safe in my makeshift shelter, I cursed that fish with every word Mama said I was too young to know, convinced that when I woke up there would be nothing left of Mama but a puddle on the floor. 

Continued in Augur Magazine Issue 5.2...