Fish
Fish-life is vicious, well, almost.
“There is such a thing as too much fish!”
That is what my Uncle Herman says when he brings home two whole washing basins full of hundreds of small and big fish – butterfish, snook, four-eyes, Banga Mary, shad, flounder. The fish he brings are the ones the housewives who meet him at the seawall to buy fresh saltwater fish don’t want.
We have our knives—one each for four of us. These knives are what we use to “clean” the fish. Cleaning means scraping scales and cutting the back and side fins, tail fins, and gills. It seems like the gutting never stops.
We are scared of the fish in which we find whole smaller fish! We had never thought about how fish live. They cannibalize other fish.
“When I grow up, I will never eat fish,” my little sister vows. And yes, she is a vegan today.
We try our best to clean as many fish as possible because we know my uncle wants to feed us well. No amount of understanding of him and what he wants to do to help us, motherless children, can prevent us from hating the job of cleaning fish.
We make choices. We give up on some of the soft-belly, smelly fish.
Someone gets a brilliant idea: Put the fish in a plastic bag and bury them in the side drain. That way, we can hide a lot of fish and avoid cleaning all of them.
And that we do! And the plan works well – well, almost.
A day or two later, the fish bloated and filled the plastic bags, which rose triumphantly from their watery graves to greet us. Luckily, the adults never saw them. We took them out to the big trench and flung them wide. Live fish we knew nothing about attacked the dead ones and finished them up!
A Fish-life is vicious even when they are dead.