Longlist Saturdays: Fishmonger by Dacey Eliot

Lou saw the red van as soon as he turned the corner. He was just a minute away from reaching the shop. Lou needed to receive shipments at work, so he had memorized the vans that would park in front. Most of the vans were white. The shellfish van was blue.  There hadn’t been a red van in a very long time, and not quite this colour red either. It was also only seven o’clock. Quite early for a van.

Closing the distance to the front door, Lou examined the van.

Chip’s HVAC

He hadn’t seen Chip’s HVAC here before. Lou let himself into the shop and locked the door behind him.

The fish shop was not the height of luxury, or of customer service, or even of fish. Lou had worked there for fifteen years, and what he held onto was the familiarity. The easy rhythm of knowing every path to every spot. The walls, papered with outdated OSHA posters and diagrams, had once been white. They became a pale, blotchy toothpaste shade over time. The walk-in fridge had a child-sized stain running down the front of it, the colour of orange pekoe. Every appliance had dark islands over its surface where the paint had started chipping away. The incessant droning of the customer-facing refrigerators was Lou’s daily music.

Steph was frantically cleaning behind the fifty-year-old counter with half the store’s lights still off.

“Ciao,” Steph said.

         “Where is everyone?” Lou asked. He made his way toward the staff cubby.

          “Sick. Sick sick sick,” Steph answered. Her dark bangs were clinging loosely to the sweat on her forehead.

         This was not surprising. It was the height of cold and flu season. Technically, the staff were only permitted to have one sick day per year, but most of the staff were on day ten or eleven. Steph was also sick frequently, but she was the manager, so she had to be there. His coworkers couldn’t afford to be sick, but Lou could afford it even less. His medication produced a two-yard receipt every time he went to the pharmacy, and the wages at the store remained minimum. He had been cutting back on his prescribed dosages to no avail.

  Lou stowed his thin puffer jacket and lunch bag in the cubby. He took his apron from the laundry room and went behind the counter. Lou noticed an odour in the air. Fifteen years ago, there had been an overwhelming fish smell, but his nose had gone blind to it around year three. This was something else. Something Lou couldn’t name, but something harsh and ozonous.

            “Do you smell something strange?” Lou asked. He went to the sink and turned on the hot water. Steph didn’t look at him. She was focused on the microfibre cloth that she buffed the fridge doors with.

            “It’s the new HVAC guys. As soon as they got on the roof, I smelled it. They said it’s normal. Bargain brand coolant? Dunno.”

            “What happened to Greg’s HVAC?” Lou soaped his hands as steam peeled up from the bottom of the basin.

            “Too pricey. Boss man switched us to these ones. Whatever.”

            Lou scrubbed his nails, his wrists, his knuckles. He rinsed until his hands were blistering red.

            “Oh. Fuck. I almost forgot,” Steph said suddenly. “I have to finish like thirty invoices. Rodge dumped them on me before he left last night. Motherfucker.” She threw the cloth into the cabinet under the sink, near the hole that the dripping P-trap was eating through the bottom, and walked away. “I’ll be in the office. Can you set up? Thanks.”

Lou finished drying his hands and went about turning on the dishwasher, filling the bleach bucket, checking the fridge temperatures.

A knock on the door startled Lou. He had spaced out at some point. He turned on the rest of the lights on his way to the front. Through the door window, Lou saw a man holding a large cardboard box. Lou unlocked the door and opened it for him.

            “Thank you, sir,” the man said. He turned sideways to get the box through the door.

            “Just on the back counter, please,” Lou told him. This was the usual Tuesday deliveryman, Ryan. Though, as he hefted the box onto the counter, Ryan seemed to look a little different. Lou couldn’t place why. He was wearing a different baseball cap, maybe. Wearing it a little lower on the forehead. Lou signed the invoice.

            “Thank you,” Lou said. Ryan smiled brightly. He tore Lou’s yellow carbon copy from the invoice.

            “You’re very welcome.”

            Lou saw Ryan out and locked the door after him. Lou returned to the back, washed his hands once more, and used a paring knife to slice open the box. Inside were two smaller boxes, side by side. Lou pulled the first one out with his fingertips, and quickly put its brother in the fridge before pulling its staples free and checking its contents. 

Five silvery fish sat in the center of the box, all clumped together. Lou frowned. It was a waste of a good-sized box to put such a small amount of fish in. Nonetheless he set out a white nylon cutting board and his seafood knife. He took out the fish in a single scoop. They felt strangely dense, but then Lou was growing accustomed to fish that had been stuffed like geese. Lou ran his knife against the glittering scales to dislodge them. They flaked off like wedding confetti and rained over the cutting board. Lou tipped the board into the sink to rinse the whole thing off.

When Lou tried to remove the first head, he found unexpected resistance. The neck of a fish was not typically a challenge for him. He put a little more weight down onto his knife, and the spine finally separated. The first fillet, too, was strangely difficult. The flesh was not nearly as smooth as usual. The guts, on the other hand, were very scant. The pin bones were almost nonexistent.

Lou filleted the first fish, then the next, until they were all made into neat, rosy strips. He went to swap the finished seafood, but found that he already had the next box on the counter. He glanced from side to side. The tray of fish was gone, the cutting board was cleaned. Lou squeezed his eyes shut hard for a moment. He was spacing out again.

The room was unreasonably bright when he reopened his eyes. He pried the top of the next box open to find a single larger, darker fish.  Aside from its mass, this fish was similar to the last ones—dense, fleshy. Lou took the time to descale and fillet the fish carefully. Pale spots began to appear in his vision, and he found it hard to focus. No matter how slowly he worked, however, the fish became increasingly difficult to handle. It slid back and forth on the board like a dying thing, fighting against him. Lou set down his knife to retrieve a rag so he could make the thing stop slipping. He took one step toward the sink, and suddenly found himself looking at the ceiling. Lou’s body felt weightless. It felt cold. There must have been water on the floor. He noticed, too, that half the lights had gone out.

Lou heard the office door opening and closing again. For a few moments, the only sound he heard was his own slow breathing. Then a shrill, animalistic scream of terror. The scream went on for a time, though it seemed to be moving throughout the room, until finally a door had been closed, and the scream was muffled. Lou’s head started swimming, and he felt the beginning of a headache coming on.

Steph’s voice came wavelike in and out from behind the office door. Lou could only hear some of the words. She seemed upset, which was a bad sign.  

“Please, oh, fuck…Jesus!”

“On the corner of—”

“No, my coworker is on—”

“—Just the manager of the goddamn—”

“—All cut off of his… no, I—"

“—Arm is laying on the fucking —”

  Lou hoped he wasn’t getting a migraine. He had already been sick one day this year, he couldn’t afford another.

Dacey Eliot is a writer and artist living and working on unceded MST (Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh) territory, also known as Vancouver, British Columbia. His work has been published in Strange Horizons Magazine and the Pearls Creative Writing Anthology. More of his work can be found at daceyeliot.com