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Home > Archive > Issue 26
Peter Markus is
the author of the short fiction collections Good, Brother
 
© Calamari Press
The Moon is a Lighthouse
© New Michigan Press
and The Singing Fish
 
© Calamari Press
His stories have appeared in such journals as Denver
Quarterly, Chicago Review, Massachusetts
Review, Quarterly West, Black Warrior
Review, Post Road, and Unsaid, online at 5_Trope, taint,
pindeldyboz, elimae, and elsewhere, as well in the anthologies
New Sudden Fiction
 
© Norton
and Fiction Gallery
 
© Bloomsbury
His novel Bob, or Man on Boat is due in late 2008 from Dzanc Books.
Our Father in the Belly of the Fish
Peter Markus
posted Jan 29, 2008
Us brothers, we go down to the river to look for our walking-out
father. Our father, us brothers, we believe this, he is down by the river,
he is down here, a part of us believes, at the bottom of the muddy river.
When we call out to our father his name, when that word father comes floating
up and out from out of our open boy mouths, we are fearing that the sound
that our mouths make, those burbly sounds bumping up against all of this
muddy river water, we are afraid, us brothers are, that these sounds that
we are making, our hunting hollerings out of, father, where are you, father?
father, come out, come out, wherever you are: we are afraid, us brothers
are, that these words that are ours are going, that they have gone, by
our father, by our father’s ears, unheard. And so, what we do is,
instead of us keeping on with this calling out to our father our father’s
name and having that word make nothing but some muddy sound that not even
the fish can make out what it is that us brothers are trying to say, we
get it into our boy heads to start to look and to call out to our father
the way we have heard it said that deaf people, those of our world who
can’t with their mouths make the sounds that are words, who can’t
with their ears hear the sounds that words make—yes, we have heard
it said, yes, us brothers, we have seen it said too, that these people
who are not like us, who don’t talk like us, who don’t hear
like us, but they can, yes, they can and they do talk with their fingers:
they make words come to life with their fingering hands. You have got
to see it, if you haven’t seen it, how beautiful it is to see these
people speak without making a sound. How beautiful it is, it must be so
beautiful, to be able to make words out of fingers that are made, by a
twist of the wrist, by the bend of knuckles—these fingers that are
made to look like to us brothers, they turn into letters, sentences made
up of silent words, an alphabet made out of bone. And so, us brothers,
we take up our bonied boy fingers, we make with our mud-dusty hands, shapes
that we hope can do, here at the river, here at the bottom of this river
that is ours, what our mouths seem unable to say when they try to mouth
out that word, father. Look here. See how Brother, with his hand, he is
closing it right now to make it into a fist. Hit is what this fist of
his is saying. Or else: back off. Or, maybe yes: Brother I am ready to
take it. My hand, this hand of mine that I say hello with this hand, with
a wave of this hand that is mine, this hand that I pick up stones with
and send them skipping across the muddy skin of this river that runs its
way through this dirty river town: this hand that I hold the hammer with
is what I am really wanting you to see: see this, it is the hand that
I open it up so that the fingers on this hand are all five of them finning
and fanning out. See my hand, see with my hand: it is a starfish that
has risen up from the bottom of some long ago rivery sea. This hand, it
is a star calling out to our father his name. Us brothers, we each of
us take turns fingering that word father so that our father might see
it, so that he might rise up towards, a river-bottom fish swimming up
towards the light of the moon: a fish leaping up, breaking through the
sky of the river, opening up its fish mouth to take a bite of the moon.
Father. We say this word with our hands held up for our father to see,
to eat. We say this word father ten thousand times with our bony boy hands,
our fingers gnawed down to the muddy nubs. We walk up and down the river’s
bottom but our father does not hear or see us. Only other fish swim up
near to us brothers and come up to us brothers’ calling out. The
littler fish swim up to us brothers and nibble us on our fingers and toes.
It is possible that they believe us to be their mothers. But the bigger
fish, they swim up to us brothers and take our whole hands up inside their
fish mouths. There is this one big fish that is the biggest big fish out
of all of these coming up to us brothers fish. This fish, it is the biggest
fish that the eyes of us brothers have ever before seen. This fish, it
is as big as us brothers are big. If this big fish stood up on its big
fish tail, this big fish, it might even be bigger than the both of us.
I can see that Brother can see this too, so I look at Brother with this
look. Us brothers, there is this look that we sometimes look at each other
with. It is the kind of a look that actually hurts the eyes of the brother
who is doing the looking. Imagine that look. Look now at us brothers.
We are still looking at each other with this look that we sometimes look
between us when we hear some rivery voice say, Boys, look inside. Look
inside where? is what I am thinking, and because Brother is my brother,
Brother says, out loud, these words that I am thinking. This big fish
that is bigger than the both of us, it is then that this fish, it opens
up its fish mouth. This fish’s mouth, it is big enough for us to
stick inside of it both of our boy heads. This is what we we do. We stick
our heads into this fish’s mouth. When we do do this, when we take
a look up inside of this fish, what we see is, we see our father. It’s
our father on the inside of this fish. Our father, he is down inside the
belly of this bigger than us fish. And us brothers, us seeing our father
like this, we both know what it is that we have to do next. I hold up
with just one finger to say to our father for him to hold on. What our
father does to this is, he holds up his hand too, his thumb and be-quiet
finger touching to make themselves into a circle, and in this light that
is right now shining down from the above the river moon, our father’s
hand held up in just this make, it makes a shadow of a dog on the inside
walls of this here fish. Good, Brothers, is what our father is wanting
to say to us, his sons. He winks at us with one of his eyes. With our
eyes, us brothers, we look at each other. Brother sticks up and out a
thumb. I take this to mean that what Brother is saying is that this big
fish, it is a keeper. If you say so, Brother, I say to myself. And then
I reach my right hand down inside my right trouser pocket. What I fish
out from the inside of this pocket is the knife that us brothers use when
we take the fish that we catch out of this dirty river home in buckets
rusted with mud. What we do with these fish after we catch these fish,
after we walk with these fish back home is: we gut and we cut off the
heads off of these fish. We give each of these fish a name. Not one is
named Jimmy or John. Jimmy and John is mine and my brother’s name.
We call each other Brother. So I take this shining blade of this knife,
and then I stick, I run it, the blade of this knife, up from the tail
end of this fish all the way up to where this fish’s gill are good
and red and are about to get even redder now with its own blood. Fish,
we say, give us back our father. This, I whisper this. This, to this fish,
I hiss this into where I believe is this fish’s ear. This big fish,
it stiffens, it winces with its fish body, but it’s too late now
for this fish to put up a fight. The guts of this fish are floating up
and away, they are heading down the river, because down and away is how
most rivers like to flow. Our river is like most rivers in the way that
it flows down and away and out to the lake. But it is up, not down the
river, where us brothers want your eyes to take a look: to see, no, not
the guts of this big fish floating down and away, down the river, but
to look, to see, instead, our father, he is up from this fish’s
big fish belly, like a last breath bubbling up and out: this is our father
coming back upriver back up to be with us. Our father, he is up from the
bottom of this muddy river rising up: our father, he is up towards the
light of the moon rising up: he is, our father, a fish looking for a hook,
and a pole, and a mud-rusty bucket filled up to its brim with fish. He
is looking for us brothers for us to take him back home with us. Because
he is hungry, our father says to us. He says this to us with his hands.
It’s time, our father, he knows this—our father, he is telling
us brothers this—to come back home to us brothers, to sit back down,
a father to us sons: it is time for us to eat.
© 2007 Peter Markus
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