The Fishwives

a short story by Andrew Kozma

One cloudless winter morning, the fishwives were in the surf, silvering the water. They were bright and clear, the long slope up the cliff where the bed and breakfast sat somehow made intangible, as if Harriet could just reach out and touch them. And she wanted to. Oh god, she wanted to.

Her mother warned her this would happen someday. The return. The desire. All shortly before the fishwives came and she disappeared herself, leaving Harriet alone to carry on.

Harriet forced herself to look away, swearing a stream of curses, stopping only when her lone guest of this slow season stumbled into the long dining room for breakfast. The man eventually slumped into a chair like an unfluffed pillow. She resisted the urge to push him into shape.

“Coffee, Mr. Gout?”

Eyes half-closed, he nodded stiffly, as if his neck and body were one piece. The movement reminded Harriet of those wooden dolls her grandfather had gifted her when she was a child, and he was still alive. The memory made her feel warmly towards Mr. Gout, who had been unpresentable and generally irritable his entire stay, more a rusty automaton than a fellow human being.

She felt warmly toward him, that is, until he spoke.

“Are those the fishwives?” he asked, voice stiff and rusty as his manner.

Harriet poured his coffee, but didn’t answer, busying herself instead making the complimentary breakfast of pancakes and link sausage. She hoped he’d let the matter drop, his question sitting heavy in her chest. But when she slid the full plate in front of him, he pinned her with his eyes.

“I never thought I’d see them.” His coffee was already half gone. “I thought I’d die first.”

He was younger than he seemed. Harriet could see that now, his skin not leathery, just sapped of life. His hair was thin, uncared for. He looked like the one friend who’d stayed home from the war after everyone else had enlisted and died.

She spoke without meaning to. “I hoped they’d never return.”

Mr. Gout nodded as though he understood, even as he looked with longing at the glimmer of the fishwives skipping themselves on the surf. Each time they leapt from the water the spray blazed like phosphorous in the sunlight. Even from this distance, the ring of red scales around their mouths seemed obscene, that trick of evolution that gave them their name. Their open mouths laughing without a care.

“If I go down there, will they stay, or will they swim away?” Mr. Gout asked.

With trembling hands, he wrapped the sausages in the pancakes and tucked them into a napkin which he slipped into his jacket pocket. It was a long walk down to the shore. Tourists often packed lunches, and the beach sparkled with their trash for weeks afterward until Harriet or a storm swept the sand clean.

“Don’t go,” Harriet said, her voice more plaintive than she meant. “They ask too much.”

Mr. Gout smiled as though he agreed with her, but also as if there was no point in arguing. Our fates are foretold. The end divorced entirely from the means. Coffee cup drained, plate empty, he opened the French doors. The cold air rushing in had the sterile and safe quality of a refrigerator. Mr. Gout was polite. He closed the door quickly behind him.

Harriet busied herself with cleaning. In two days, a couple would arrive for their honeymoon. She washed dishes, mopped floors, dusted everything, all the while keeping her eyes averted from the shore. In two hours, everything that could be done was done and she looked down toward the beach. The ocean was the color of gray-blue slate. The fishwives danced atop the water. Mr. Gout was nowhere to be seen. Not on the shore or the long series of wooden stairways leading there.

The fishwives had returned, just like her mother said they would. They always did. They promised you whatever you wanted. In turn, they took whatever you needed.

Harriet remembered the few times her mother told her about the fishwives, she also talked about her father—the only grandparent Harriet ever met—and it was only now Harriet realized her mother had never said he’d died. She’d only ever said he was gone.

The air wasn’t that cold when you were fully immersed in it, Harriet thought as she descended the cliff stairs, wrapped in a thick, puffy coat, a long scarf, and a knit cap; all castoffs from previous guests. The weathered wooden steps were slick, so she walked carefully. She was forty, not old and not young, but it had been twenty years since her mom went down these steps and disappeared and, in all that time, Harriet had done her best to stay away.

A wounded bird flapped in the scrub brush next to the path up ahead of her, but, when she reached it, she found a navy blue fisherman’s cap struggling in the wind instead. Had Mr. Gout been wearing it? Harriet couldn’t remember. She scanned the beach and, for a moment, saw a dark shape sink under the water, a shape that could have been a body or a discarded jacket or simply the shadow of a cresting wave.

By the time Harriet stepped onto the wet, packed sand, she was breathing hard. The winter air magnified the sun, the light cutting everything into painful focus. The waves broke with the regularity of a grandfather clock. The fishwives were obscured at first because she was at ground level now and the swelling waves were almost as tall as her. But when the waves collapsed on the beach, she saw them, and they swam forward, too, as if to see her more clearly.

This close, Harriet noticed every scale, every imperfection in their fins. Those red scales around their mouths were bright as bloodstains and not like lips at all. The fishwives were hard to count, their bodies flowing over each other and through the water, though a constant few stayed at the front. One fishwife swam awkwardly, its eyes sad and faded like Mr. Gout’s. What did he ask of them? And did they answer?

Another fishwife twirled in the water, spinning like a licorice twist unraveling in a child’s hands. It moved the way Harriet remembered her mother dancing in the kitchen in the amber light of evening.

Harriet looked back up the winding wooden paths, toward the top of the cliff and her bed and breakfast, hunched at the edge of the precipice like a barnacle. She was convinced it would hold on forever to that bit of land, and hold her with it, if she wanted. She’d lived there her entire life, but she could no longer remember when it last felt like home. Longing rose up in her body like blood from a fresh wound.

The fishwives’ forgiving mouths mimed Speak! Speak!

It had been so long since she’d asked anyone for anything.

Harriet opened her mouth and let the ocean rush in.

Andrew Kozma has been published in Escape Pod, Flash Fiction Online, Daily Science Fiction, and Analog. His book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award, and his second poetry book, Orphanotrophia, was published in 2021 by Cobalt Press.

© Andrew Kozma. All rights reserved.