but I will not everywhere be real to you in a moment

“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.”

—Stephen King

My dad took me overnight fishing when I was seven years old.

Or maybe I was older. Wasn’t that the trip with my sister and the Moose? We still have the pictures somewhere: a toddler bundled up like a pink marshmallow, propped against a fallen tree. About ten feet behind her and to the right, a 1,500 pound moose browses contentedly. My mom snapped five or six artistically angled pictures, trying to fit my sister into the frame with the sunrise backlighting the knob-kneed creature.

Fact: Moose are taller than horses, outweigh grizzly bears, and can run up to 35 miles per hour. They kill or injure approximately 304 people per year. Granted, 300 of those injuries/fatalities are due to automobile collisions. But still, they’re dangerous wild animals. I don’t even know. That’s a different story anyways.

I was approximately 7-9 years old the first and only time my dad took me overnight fishing. We were camping next to Georgetown Lake, or Flathead Lake, or It-Doesn’t-Really-Matter-What-I-Call-It Lake. Here’s what you need to know: there was a campsite, a lake, a boat, a moose. We loaded up the boat at sunset. We brought: three fishing poles, two tackle boxes (hooks, sinkers, lures, smelly orange caviar balls, extra line, knives, slicksilver rubber fish), a styrofoam container of dirt and night crawlers from under the apple tree, a package of marshmallows, a family-sized bag of teriyaki beef jerky, one Disney princess-themed sleeping bag, a red cooler of assorted adult and non-adult beverages, my dad’s friend Dan, one industrial strength spotlight.

Once we launched we were primal; nocturnal predators trolling for Rainbows, Bulls, Cutthroats, Browns. Remember the glint of fishing lines tangled in moonlight, stretched away into the impossible dark like kite strings mooring us to something solid. Remember stars splayed like a roadmap my father taught me to read. See there? Orion, Cassiopeia, the Pleiades. Remember marshmallows bobbing in our wake, white markers on a roadside; a trail of ghosts or maybe tears. No, too cliché. Remember those men. Those rough men drinking domestic beer, offering me my first sips. How my father taught me to slit a fish’s swollen belly, taught me to precisely end a life.  

No. None of that happened.

My hands were cold. Everything smelled like damp. The boat made me sick. I fell asleep early, far too early, burrowed deep in my sleeping bag. I woke up pre-dawn to a slick smear of scales and bloody innards, heads and guts strewn across the bottom of the boat. While my mother propped my baby sister against a fallen tree, while a moose nosed through campsite debris, while my father reeled in feet and yards and miles of line, while the waking sun evaporated heavy sheets of fog, I cried. I cried for the heaviness of morning dew and the stained purples and pinks of my sleeping bag, and how one life can end, precisely, with a fish’s slit belly.

This morning I woke up with that bitter blood throbbing in my throat.

This morning I dreamed thick slabs of fish garnished with lures.

This morning I pricked my finger on that hook and sucked history from my veins.

This morning you pressed your kiss into the hollow of my throat. You slid your child’s pose into the cradle of my pelvis, said Baby. Good morning. And goddamn, those words sound like a promise in your mouth. Please keep them under your tongue for the next time reality feels a little loose around the edges. Say Baby, baby, baby like a mantra. Like a litany. Baby. Baby.

I love you.

-b