by Samantha O’Brien
Hatching
The first thing Jack remembers ever knowing is that salmon return to their place of birth to die. When exactly he first acquired this piece of knowledge, he cannot say. This knowledge is visceral, a collage of sensory memories—the gentle careen of Bernadette, his father’s rusty green troller, the silver glint in the water that would set his stomach churning, early autumn: the stunning symmetry of salmon arranging themselves in neat rows. Each and every one preparing to die.
At seven years old, Jack considers this as he peers up at his mother’s distended stomach, swollen now with his baby brother, Carson. Jack’s mother pulls him close and gestures for him to rub her belly.
“Tell me what you feel, Jack”.
Jack presses a tiny, round palm into his mother’s billowing peasant top. He feels his baby brother kicking.
“Tell me what you hear, Jack”.
Jack places an ear to her navel. Outside, he hears the steady, familiar patter of Southeast Alaskan rainfall. Inside, he hears tiny legs, splashing about in a thick fluid. Perhaps Carson is doing the backstroke.
The splashing reminds Jack of helping his father out at the salmon hatchery during egg-take season. Donning identical pea-green waders and oversized Xtratuf rainboots, Jack and his father would stand day after summer day beneath the concrete pavilion—the steady drone of rain drilling into the roof—gazing into the Crescent Harbor. Without respite, his father spent the day cranking tremendous net out the water, filled to the brim with frantic, flopping fish. One by one, Jack’s father removes these frantic, flopping bodies, holds them down on the table, and pounds the life out of their tiny noggins with metal club. Jack thinks the metal club resembles a miniature baseball bat, and all of this makes him feel quite ill.
“You know the thing everyone fears most, Jack-Attack”, his father would prompt, hoisting a fish out of the water by its tail.
“Dying,” Jack would respond, his knees buckling as the fish would flail about in tiny, desperate movements.
“Close,” his father would say, lifting the metal club high above his head. “Dying, but without ever making it home”. A slam—metal against liquid against metal. A final twitch—a ghastly hint of an afterlife. Unable to control the urge, Jack would find himself gazing back in the direction of the net, at the silvery sheen of salmon toiling about, minding their own business, unwittingly relishing their final moments in their liquid home.
Jack takes a deep inhale of his mother—spruce tip and laundry detergent-scented. He imagines his baby brother—ginger and speckled, a shrunken version of himself— sloshing about in his own liquid home. He likes this image—is perhaps even a bit envious of it. He wants to be closer. Jack presses his cheek deep, deep into his mother’s belly—collapsing, succumbing to her inviting warmth.
Spawning Season
The ultraviolet Southern Californian sun streams diagonally through the cracked open window and into Jack’s UCLA dorm room.
“Ok so ‘thumb’ is ‘chum’,” says Nicole, wiggling a polished thumb in Jack’s face.
“Yes,” says Jack, blinking, the sunlight refracting off of Nicole’s manicure and into his line of vision.
“Which hardly anyone likes. Second to worst kind of salmon out there.”
“You got it.”
“‘And ‘pointer’ is ‘sockeye’. Because when I go like this—” Nicole pauses, shooting her second finger towards Jack’s bare retinas; Jack stops her finger with his palm, gives it a brief squeeze, and kisses it—his face growing warm as a consequence of his impulsiveness. Nicole wriggles her finger out of his grasp in a gentle exasperation, “Because I can sock you in the eye with it.”
“You sure can,” Jack murmurs, relieved to finally feel his body temperature returning to normal.
“And then this one is king salmon,” says Nicole, exaggerating the extension of her middle finger. “Because it’s the Big Daddy.”
“Big Daddy is right,” says Jack, leaning back into his bed frame and resting the back of his head in his hands. Nicole continues to move through her theatrical rendition of the five-finger salmon mnemonic. Jack notes that Nicole seems to derive a sensual pleasure from the opportunity to perform. Rattling off salmon types might as well be a striptease.
“…Aaand last—which also in this case, happens to be least—we have your pink salmon! Hence pinky,” she says, triumphant, tilting her chin upwards and framing her face with ten, wiggling fingers.
Leaning forward and steadying the back of her head with his palm, he pushes his mouth into hers with starling urgency.
Nicole pulls away, an impish gleam in her eye, “What?” she demands, “No words of praise for your East Coast girlfriend and her remarkably quick absorption of your Alaskan lexicon?”
“These are my words of praise,” says Jack, leaning forward to catch her mouth again. The truth is, it makes Jack somewhat uneasy to hear this beautiful, strange woman regurgitate the facts of his homeland. Jack pushes Nicole down on her back, quelling his discomfort momentarily. In her ecstatic repose, she wraps a slender leg around his torso, stroking her big toe up and down the small of his back. He slides his hands beneath her tee shirt and up her back and removes her bra, considering it for a moment. Embellished with bows and crystal studs, it is a foreign object. An import from an incomprehensible time and place.
Or perhaps it was him that was the import. It has been awhile since Jack had not felt at least somewhat alien. Perhaps a long, long time ago, home had been something clear, real, and tangible. It had been cold air. Impossible darkness. Briny fingers. The meat-mixed-with-cotton-candy smell of freshly killed deer. A face full of salt-spray during a day out on his father’s skiff. But eventually, even the perfect little niche that was Southeast Alaska lost its hospitality.
The summer that Jack turned seven and his mother was expected to give birth to his brother Carson, her uterus ruptured, taking both her life as well as her baby’s. For a brief period, Jack still managed to take comfort in the sensory world, in the perfectly clean filth of hands covered in blood and fish slime. He continued to accompany his father to the hatchery on weekends, where the two of them toiled away side-by-side in silence. They had always been a reticent pair; this much had not changed.
Jack’s role was to separate the males from the females. His father taught him when he was young how to differentiate. The females had the bloated bellies; the males had the sharp, pointy teeth. To be completely sure, you could pinch your fingers and slide them down the salmon’s torso—essentially, milking him or her. If a little red-orange egg popped out, it was a female. If a thin almond milk-like substance leaked, it was a male. This is how it went, day after day. Until one day, perhaps seven weeks after the death of his mother and brother:
“We got another guy over here, Jack-Attack,” said Dad, tossing a fish over to Jack’s end of the table, the tail still twitching, an eerie suggestion of life-after-death.
“Nother guy,” repeated Jack, running his finger along the crests of the salmon’s pointed teeth and down its flat tummy. Beneath Jack are two buckets, one swirling with a creamy fluid. The other empty; the would-be container of salmon eggs. Jack takes the fish into his arms and tilts it downward, squeezing it, milking it into the nearly full bucket.
Dad’s head shoots up, his right hand still pounding away, obliterating yet another life from existence. “We’re going to need some more ladies soon, or we’re in trouble”.
The empty bucket stared up at Jack like a womb, sliced-open and barren. The fluid-filled bucket swirled around uselessly.
Jack could never quite shake the image of the two buckets—the one gurgling with a sterile, milky substance, and the other, desolate. It was after that that he started inventing excuses and stopped coming with his father to the hatchery. Southeast Alaska, which had once been Edenic, an eternal bounty, was now, to Jack, a graveyard. A site of massacre, where mothers and fathers were beat to death in their own homes by grizzled men in flannel. Where icky white fluid remained icky white fluid, obliterating any hope for a future.
From that day on, Jack found himself counting the days until he could leave. Instead of spending the weekends trolling around on Bernadette with his father, he spent them on the internet discovering hip-hop and rap, music that beckoned him to a place urban and sunny, gritty and cultured. As he grew older, he spent the weekends scrolling through Google Images—his go-to search: universities in California. And at 18, his acceptance into University of California in Los Angeles was his golden ticket.
It was there he met Nicole From Woodbridge, Connecticut. The first person that Jack ever knew to wear t-shirts like “fuck the patriarchy” and say jargony, political phrases off the cuff, like “female friendship is a site a resistance”. She was also the first person he knew who knew someone who went to an Ivy League school (her sister). He didn’t know what any of this meant exactly, but it drew him to her, like antique china to a child’s curious, outstretched palm. Shiny and dangerous, smooth but breakable. And now here she was, reciting something with a brazen confidence that she likely pulled from a Wikipedia article. Something that was both true and yet sapped of honesty.
“Hey, I’m over here!” Nicole quips, her breasts bare and arms splayed out theatrically, as if prepared to drawl, “paint me like one of your French girls.” Jack leans forward, taking Nicole’s left nipple urgently in his mouth, expecting warmth. Yet still, he feels cold.
Upstream
The first thing Jack notices is the smell. Stepping out of the airport, he takes a deep inhale— the musky odor that comes when moisture is met with decay. A smell that simultaneously evokes death and life; one, Jack determines, not a negation of the other but rather, a quiet coexistence.
A scratched-up red Jeep 4×4 pulls up, headlights blinking in the fog like a lighthouse. A man in a faded yellow baseball cap dips his head out the window. Jack swings open the car and sits, pulling his navy L.L. Bean duffel into his lap.
“Hey, Dad,” says Jack.
“Jack-Attack,” his father murmurs softly, hitting the gas pedal and turning onto the main road.
The two drive in silence. Within minutes, they pass the hatchery. Without comment, his father pulls over. August, an egg-take season like countless egg-take seasons before it, the salmon have begun to arrange themselves in careful rows. Making themselves comfortable before death. Yet it is more than that, Jack realizes, fixing his gaze on the king fish closest to him. The salmon splashes about, reveling in the familiar cool of his home for what might be the last time but could also just as easily be the first time, and either way, it is a delicious little pocket of eternity.
Jack rolls down the window and takes a luxurious inhale.
In May, Samantha graduated from Amherst College after completing a Senior Honors Thesis, in which they analyzed the role of prostitution in 20th Century American literature. Samantha’s work, poetry, prose, and journalism have been published in LikelyRed literary magazine and campus publications, including Circus (literary magazine), The Indicator (journal of social and political thought) and The Amherst Student, (newspaper). Samantha currently lives in Sitka, Alaska, conducting a nine-month fellowship with a domestic violence agency. Samantha plans to apply for an MFA in Creative Writing once they have completed their fellowship.