Eels
It’s nearly dawn. The water of Seneca Lake is still and exceptionally warm—like a bath, Emma says. The beach park won’t be open for hours yet. It was Emma’s idea to leave their bed at the inn and sneak into the park this early.
They’re in the heart of New York’s wine country. Vineyards drape over the region like lace, and all around the vineyards are humid forests buzzing with insects and dotted with the golden and pink blossoms of hazy weeds. Along the lake, winding lanes dip down to cottage after cottage as well as the stretch of beach where Emma and Carl now tread the shadowed water. There’s no breeze. The air is thick with the scent of burdock and ragweed.
“Let’s play eels,” Emma says.
“Okay,” Carl says. “What are the rules?”
“It isn’t that sort of game. You just pretend to be an eel. Like this.”
Emma dives under the water and circles Carl, brushing against his torso, hips, groin, her body undulating. She pops up out of the water, laughing, and slicks her hair back from her forehead, the pixie cut she got just before their wedding with the little bangs and the hair shaved up from the nape of her neck. Carl loves the way the bristles in back feel.
When they tire of swimming, they retreat, naked and gleaming, to their blanket. They lie side by side facing each other, bellies, thighs, and feet touching. Carl feels a familiar stab of worry about making love, but Emma’s doctor has assured him that sex can’t hurt the fetus. Still. It’s so tiny, just a few months along. He imagines it floating in a fine, delicate bubble, though he knows that its dwelling is strong and robust. He kisses Emma’s throat. She wiggles underneath him, clings to him.
A cluster of little brown birds watches them. The birds, perched on a branch that’s fallen into the water, are so still, they might not be real. Carl knows he and Emma are real: skin, hair, muscle, blood coursing through them, and then his gasping cry when he comes, which startles the little brown birds. They shriek and lift and flap into the pale sky.
Emma and Carl put on t-shirts, shorts, and sandals and find a grassy clearing where they throw rocks at the trunks of the surrounding trees. One irregularity in a trunk looks like a laughing mouth, a crying mouth—crying so hard, it’s laughing. Thunk! Emma sings softly a folk tune in Gaelic and does handstands and ungraceful flips. She gets grass cuttings and clover stuck to her skin. She flops down on the blanket next to Carl, grows quiet, and falls asleep. Carl watches her. So simple and easy, her nap. He envies it. Sleep is a hard black thing like a beetle’s shell that he has to climb uncomfortably inside of.
Emma is a taxidermist. Her livelihood involves animal corpses and she is comfortable with this in a way that astounds Carl. Her studio is not what he expected; what he expected was a stinking, blood-soaked slaughterhouse with animal husks dripping from hooks. But the animals come to Emma already dead and stay in a freezer until she is ready to work on them in the neat, clean, brightly lit studio. She drives a powder blue 1973 Buick Electra that she restored herself. She’s the only child of an Irish mother and a German father. She has a small tattoo of the Egyptian goddess Bastet on the inside of her wrist. When she was an exchange student in France, she ate boiled eels with mushrooms.
Carl is a student of literature, a reluctant omnivore, and an agnostic (because what if there is a god and she’s pissed?). He has no tattoos, no vintage car, and he’d rather stick needles in his eyes than eat an eel, but he can run fast for miles, and he writes stories that captivate Emma—little Twilight Zones, she calls them. Emma says that she adores Carl, and he knows he adores her, even if he’s scared of love, the power of it, the sweep and boundlessness. He’s also afraid of heights, choking, caves, cancer, the ocean, riptides, rogue waves, big dogs, bears, guns, knives, anesthesia, asphyxiation, nuclear war, brain tumors, rabies, and his impending fatherhood.
Emma continues napping. Emma, his wife. Carl has seen her stretching and sewing dead skin over an armature. Poking glass eyes into dead sockets and singing along to Badfinger, the Hollies, the Beatles while she does it. She’s happy when she sings. She often sings to him.
***
It’s already a stiflingly humid day. Wide awake, Carl leaves the clearing and goes back to the beach. He spreads out a towel, takes off his shirt and sandals, and wades into the water. It’s warm but still refreshing; it laps around his calves. The sky is brightening with striations of peach and plum over the hills across the lake. “Good morning, sunshine,” Carl’s mom used to say to wake him up when he was little. Carl smiles. Good morning, sunshine.
Carl’s mom died five years ago when Carl was starting his doctoral program. His mom supported him enormously. It’d just been him and his mom and brother for a long time, making their way without his dad whom Carl barely remembers. His dad was killed in a car accident when Carl was three. His mom remained single, wistful, and pensive until the end of her life. Carl believed that she found joy in him and his brother. She never went to college and was thrilled by the idea of Carl earning his Ph.D.
Now it’s Emma who encourages him to finish the degree. While he doesn’t want to be a barista forever, the idea of interviewing for a position in academia makes him nauseous. The idea of writing and defending his dissertation brings on panic attacks that make him feel as though he might actually die, like his heart could stop, or he could have a massive stroke, or an aneurysm, a pulmonary embolism, a fatal seizure.
Carl hears from behind him: “Want a raisin?”
He turns around and sees a kid, maybe five or six years old, holding a giant tub of raisins. The kid’s hair curls upward on his head like a little pompadour. His skinny arms and legs are sunburned and there are neon green water wings around his tiny biceps. He’s wearing baggy blue swim trunks with big spotted dogs on them.
“Where’d you come from?” Carl says.
“I’m Lewis,” the kid says as if Carl should know this.
Carl looks around in search of the kid’s parents. There’s no one. Why would anyone else be here this early?
“What’s your name?” Lewis says.
“Uh, I’m Carl. Where are your parents?”
The kid tosses a raisin in his mouth. “Dad’s home,” he says.
“It isn’t safe to be by the water alone.”
The boy shrugs. “I can swim. I can swim across the lake. I did it a bunch of times. I have a billion bathing suits. I like raisins. I’m not allowed to play GTA.”
“GTA?”
Lewis sighs and looks at Carl. “Grand. Theft. Auto.”
“I know what GTA is. It’s just… Do your parents know you’re out here? Where do you live?”
“Not far. Over yonder.”
“Yonder, huh?”
“It’s a word. I heard it on Little House on the Prairie. It’s an old show. So is Knight Rider. I hate Knight Rider.” Lewis plops down in the gravel of the beach and nestles the tub of raisins beside him. “What’s your favorite car? I like the Honda Fit.”
“Really? I thought you’d like, I don’t know, a Mustang or something.”
“A mustang is a wild horse.”
“It is, but it’s also a car.”
Lewis regards Carl a moment. “I’m going into second grade,” he says with authority. He adds, “I know what a tapir is. My mom is gone.”
Carl watches the kid examine a scab on his arm. Is his mom dead? Carl imagines the boy in a little funeral suit and black shoes, grieving in the rain. “My mom’s gone, too,” Carl says.
“Is she in Detroit?”
“She got very sick and died.”
This doesn’t seem to register with Lewis. He shoves a handful of raisins in his mouth and chews with loud smacking sounds. “My mom’s in Detroit,” he says. “I was born there. No, I mean London. London Bridges. My dad went to Africa one time and ate an antelope. There’s a place called Turks and Cakeholes.”
Carl laughs. “It’s Turks and Caicos.”
Lewis gets up and starts spinning in circles with his arms outstretched. “You should do this,” he says. He keeps spinning, then he stops and tries to walk, stumbles, falls down laughing.
“Hey, Lewis,” Carl says. “I really think you should go home and get a grown-up to watch you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a little kid.”
“Am not. Hey, I know. Walk me home. You can see my house. It’s humongous. It cost a zillion dollars.”
The boy’s plan is as good as any. Carl puts his shirt and sandals back on and rolls up his towel. He returns to the clearing with Lewis following. Emma is still asleep.
“Who’s that?” Lewis says.
“My wife.”
“Is she dead?”
Carl leaves Lewis at the edge of the clearing and crouches next to Emma’s sleeping form. “This little kid showed up,” he says. “I’m going to walk him home.”
Emma opens one eye. “Little kid?” she says.
“Yeah. He lives around here.”
In one quick and clumsy motion, Emma sits up. “Hi, little kid!” she says.
“Hello, ma’am,” Lewis says.
“Ma’am?” Emma laughs. “Ma’am. I like it.”
“So I’m just going to take him home,” Carl says.
Lewis looks around. “Where are your kids?”
“We don’t have any,” Carl says.
“We do so, Carl,” Emma says. She places her hand on her belly and gazes at Lewis. “There’s one in here. She’ll come out next spring.”
Lewis walks over and presents the raisins to Emma. “Want some?”
Emma smiles and reaches into the tub. “I love raisins,” she says. “Have you ever eaten golden raisins? How about capers? They’re like tiny olives.”
Emma’s hair is sticking up on her head, and as she talks to the kid, it strikes Carl who Lewis reminds him of.
***
Lewis lives in a sprawling ranch that seems out of place in the Finger Lakes. It’s near the inn where Carl and Emma are staying, and while it wouldn’t have cost a zillion dollars, it surely wasn’t cheap. Its landscaping is pristine: arbor vitae form a barrier between the towering trees and a lawn of soft grass with gardens of echinacea and black-eyed susans. Carl and Lewis go inside the house through a back hallway into a large kitchen. There’s a white and brown pit bull lying in the corner of the room. The animal gets up and stares at Carl. Carl freezes. The dog yawns, flops to the floor, and rolls onto its back. It squirms, scratching its back, and lets out a moan.
“That’s Larry,” Lewis says. He puts the raisin tub on a stool by the door and takes off his water wings. “He’s smelly.”
Carl doesn’t notice any dog smell; rather, the kitchen smells like baked apples and cinnamon. He hears someone humming. There’s a pantry off the kitchen; a tall humming man comes out of it and looks at Carl and Lewis. “Hey,” he says as if he expected them to be standing there.
“Hey, Dad,” Lewis says. He goes over and flops on the floor in between the pit bull and a massive bag of dog food.
“Your son was at the lake,” Carl says. “I walked him back here.”
“Sure. Thanks,” the man says. He’s wearing a Blue Oyster Cult t-shirt and has long spindly arms, a prominent Adam’s apple, and deep-set eyes. He puts an industrial-sized container of coffee on the butcher block island near a big Bunn coffee maker. Carl wonders if these people buy everything in bulk. The man says, “I bet you’re a guest at the inn.”
“Yes, with my wife.”
“Where’s your wife?”
“At the lake.”
“Park’s not open yet.”
“No, but your son was there. By himself.”
“Yeah, he wanders,” the man says. He puts a filter and coffee grounds into the coffee maker. His fingers are shaped like kayak paddles. “Lewis likes the lake in the morning. He knows not to go swimming though, not alone.”
“I think he was planning to go swimming.”
The man shrugs. “He just likes to wander. Didn’t you wander when you were a kid?” Before Carl can answer, the man says, “You did. We all did. We did things that’d turn our parents’ hair white. I tell you, I climbed shit. Real high-up shit. The fire tower, the bridge, the side of the school by the gym. I could’ve broken my head open, broken my back, but here I am.” He stares at Carl with piercing but not unfriendly eyes. “I’m Ace, by the way. Ace O’Shaughnessy.” He extends his hand.
“Carl Bishop.” Carl walks over and shakes hands.
“Where are you from, Carl?”
“Buffalo. I’m, well, I’ll be a student. My wife is a taxidermist.”
“No kidding!” Ace says. “That’s cool as hell.”
Carl thinks of the row of pheasants currently in her studio that might not agree. Or the turkey vulture for the historical society, the ermine with holes where its glass eyes will be, its body deflated, waiting. Emma’s studio: a smell like burnt toast, and sawdust, epoxy, wet fur.
“She wants to start doing aquatic animals,” Carl says. “Salamanders, rainbow trout, turtles. She has a piranha mounted on a river rock. She’s had this thing since she was a kid. It’s what got her into taxidermy.”
“A piranha, huh? That’s crazy, man.” Ace puts his hand on his chin and rubs the stubble there. The coffee maker hisses and steams and fills the room with its rich scent. “So who buys the stuff she makes?”
“People commission it. Collectors, hunters, middle-aged women, young couples. She has a wide variety of clients, wider than you’d think.”
“A whole world of taxidermy enthusiasts.”
“Something like that.”
Again Ace stares, his eyes like laser beams. “It bothers you,” he says.
“A little, I guess,” Carl says. “I could never do what she does. I mean, it’s not like she kills the animals—it’s just the idea of working with dead things that way, you know?”
Lewis and Larry wander over and stand next to Carl. Carl can smell Larry: kibble breath, corn chips, flatulence. “They have a baby,” Lewis says. “It’s coming here next spring.”
Carl says, “My wife’s due in the spring.”
“Congrats,” Ace says. “It’s a world of fun.”
Carl wonders if Ace means this sarcastically or honestly. He wants to think the man is being honest. There are enough prophets of doom when it comes to expecting a baby: your life as you know it is about to end, you’ll never sleep again, you don’t know what freedom is until it’s gone. Carl hates that some people feel it’s their right to give him their opinion, and that these people suddenly have such a dim view of parenthood when faced with a pregnant woman. Or worse, that they enjoy handing out their dire predictions. He knows it’ll be hard to have a baby. He doesn’t need to be told; he catastrophizes enough on his own. A world of fun.
Carl jumps when the pit bull nuzzles his hand. The animal puts its haunches down on Carl’s foot. Carl challenges himself to touch the dog’s head. It’s soft and warm. Lewis is spinning around as he did at the lake and showing little regard for the edges of furniture and countertops.
“Careful, dude,” Ace says. “You’ll bust your noggin.”
“Aren’t you afraid he’ll hurt himself some other way?” Carl says. “Wandering and all?”
“Around the lake? Nah. This kid has grown up here. Knows the area like a little bobcat.”
Carl imagines the being in Emma’s belly wandering around on its own, talking to people it doesn’t know. An infant the size of a pinto bean, leaping and hopping from person to person, offering raisins, spinning. The pit bull is looking up at him. It grunts, farts, and walks back to its corner where it lets out a world-weary sigh and curls up in the sun.
“My wife,” Carl says softly, more to himself than anyone else. “She’s so okay with it.”
Ace says, “The taxidermy?”
“Everything. Life.”
Lewis lets out a whoop. Ace laughs and says, “Good way to be.”
***
That night in their bed at the inn, Carl stares into the darkness. He looks at his phone. It’s 3:21 a.m. Emma is asleep and snoring, her hands resting on her belly. Carl sits up.
Emma stirs and says, “Can’t sleep?”
“No. I think I’ll go outside, walk a little.”
“You want me to come?”
“No, you sleep. I’ll be back soon.”
Carl creeps out of the inn, crosses the road, and heads to the park. The moon is nearly full. The muggy night smells of soil and damp leaves. A little bat zooms past his head. At the lake, he strips down to his boxer briefs and stands on the beach. He can do this; he can go into this dark mass and swim until the water is over his head, until he’s really in it, this body of water that plunges more than six-hundred feet into the earth. There’s nothing in it that can hurt him—no tides, no sharks or jellyfish. He’s going to be a tiny person’s father. He can swim in a lake at night.
He wades in, then pushes off and swims out. He pulls himself through the darkness, kicks to keep himself moving forward. He’s a good swimmer. His mom had him and his brother take swimming lessons up to the lifeguarding level. He wants to be submerged, to feel the water over him. He somersaults through the murk, surfaces for a deep breath, dives down, turns, stretches.
But then he’s confused, frightened, uncertain of where he is in the water. He’s heard about disoriented airplane pilots who fly their planes straight into the ground because they think they’re headed up into the sky. Tendrils of fear reach from his chest to his limbs. Panic builds, pushes. He doesn’t know where the surface is. He can’t hold his breath much longer.
And then. Then he’s not alone. There are hundreds of eels buoying him up, swimming around him, lifting him to the surface. It’s not possible, but here they are. His head comes out of the water into the close night air. He breathes in, out, in deeper. He exhales laughter. Eels wiggle and squirm around him, bump against his body. They pull him back into their current. They pull him back to shore, to the gravelly beach, to Emma.
“Eels” was selected by Raul Palma as the winner of the Distinguished Voices Short Story Contest
“I love this story! It’s deceptive in its simplicity: a couple, expecting, vacationing in the Finger Lakes. But the setting—as this adjacent space to Carl and Emma’s usual life—holds this weight and uncertainty of a complex world to come. The writing is evocative and beautifully rendered– projecting Emma’s fascination with taxidermy out onto the natural world, much in the way that it does the same for Carl’s anxieties about being a parent. But, perhaps, the real power in this story is the association made between play—at the story’s beginning—and survival. Well done!” – Raul Palma, author of In This World of Ultraviolet Light and A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens
Emily Glossner Johnson: I am currently pursuing my M.A. in History at SUNY Cortland. I hold degrees from SUNY Buffalo and SUNY Brockport. I have had short stories, poetry, and essays published in several literary journals. I live in Syracuse where I love to write, read, and spend time with my family and two cats.