Herring

24 Hours...

24 hours until the incident…

~

Another day another do-or-f*****g-die. As you might've guessed it's me Deia this time, back to narrate this shitty story called my life.

God help me.

~

I woke up before my alarm.

I want you to understand the specific violence of that. I'd set my alarm for seven. I opened my eyes at six forty-three. Seventeen minutes. Seventeen minutes of sleep, stolen from me. Gone. Dead. Buried. Very much like my enthusiasm for being a living person, but we don't discuss that before the first cup.

Seventeen f*****g minutes! My God, cocksucker couldn't even last that long!

I made some coffee the way I would any other day. The machine maundered. I growled back. A beautiful, honest relationship, quite frankly the most functional one I've got going. The coffee came out slightly burnt, drank it anyway, couldn't be any more bothered than I was already because I am nothing if not committed to poor decisions at six in the morning.

Outside Seattle was being its usual grey bastard self, no surprise there. Clouds the colour of a government document, rain hovering uncertainly in the air like it wasn't too sure it wanted to commit to the downpour today, which truly was fair enough. I stood perched on the window sharing a moment, the rain and I. Two entities with no particular desire to be here.

I had errands.

Three of them.

On a sticky note.

Placed on the fridge.

I didn't look at the fridge.

Fuck the fridge.

The school thing. Oh God, the school thing.

Right.

That.

I had, somewhere during the hours between sleep and consciousness, developed a makeshift theory that if I simply didn't think about the fish incident, it would cease to have ever existed. Selective amnesia. Sounded like the perfect coping mechanism. Perfectly healthy. Totally sustainable. Yeah. I'd read somewhere one day I think — that the human brain is pretty damn good at protecting itself from unbearable truths, and I was choosing to believe that applied to the bathroom floor fish situation. I hoped it did.

It probably didn't.

It definitely didn't.

I got dressed with the ever so magnitudinous energy of someone preparing up for a war they hadn't consented to join. Baggy jeans, my fav. A shirt that said nothing too offensive. Hair that said even less. I looked in the mirror for approximately three seconds, decided that was just about enough information, then left.

The bike was waiting outside like a loyal and entirely unfeeling piece of machinery that didn't care what kind of morning I was having. Good. Neither did I, technically. I clipped in and let the hill do its thing — chain catching twice on the way down which I interpreted as a bad omen and then immediately decided not to, because I was already carrying fish-based baggage and bad omens were above my current emotional weight limit.

The weather held, at least. Small mercies.

I gave myself what I can only describe as a very sincere internal pep talk somewhere around the third intersection.

Nobody really saw. Nobody really cares. It was an accident. People don't discuss accidents. People don't —

Who the f**k am I kidding.

The campus claimed my walking corpse at eight fifty-two, grey and indifferent, smelling of wet concrete and other people's coffee. I walked the way I always walk when I'm trying not to be perceived as an entity that exists — just a tad quick, eyes between upfront and down below, bag strap held with both hands like it owed me something.

I was fine.

Perfectly, completely fine.

The hallway outside the main building had its typical morning clutter — clusters of people with nowhere important to be, loitering with the practiced ease of those whom existence had never personally inconvenienced. Lucky them. I moved through the gaps, quiet, deliberate, bothering no one —

"— no I'm serious, I heard she carries fish in her bag or something —"

I continued walking, but faster. I must've been imagining things.

"— someone said she keeps them. Like. On her person —"

Walking even faster.

"— bro I heard she keeps fish in her v****a that's why the bathroom smelled like that —"

I stopped walking.

There are moments in a person's life that bifurcate cleanly into before and after. I was having one. I was standing in a corridor at eight fifty-three in the morning being informed, secondhand, that I had become a rumour about vaginal fish storage, and the before version of me — the one who had woken up seventeen minutes early with something resembling hope — was already gone. Deceased. Buried next to the fish.

Okay, I said, to myself, internally, because saying it out loud would've required a jaw that was still functioning.

Okay. Cool.

That's a thing.

That people are saying.

With their mouths.

About me.

I kept walking.

It got worse, as things that can get worse reliably do. By the time I reached the second floor corridor it had momentum — the way rumours do when they find people bored enough to carry them. A group of girls I recognised by proximity but not by name were huddled near the water fountain, and two of them looked up when I passed, and one of them — the one with the kind of face that suggested she'd been decorative her entire life and found it sufficient — leaned to the other and said something behind her hand, and they laughed the specific laugh that is designed to be heard.

I looked straight ahead.

Don't.

Don't you dare.

On the stairs, someone had left a tin of sardines on the step with the label facing up. No name attached. No note. Just sitting there with the casual cruelty of something that required planning — someone had gone to a shop, purchased a tin of sardines, carried it to campus, and placed it on a staircase specifically for my benefit. The dedication.

Honestly. I was almost flattered.

I stepped over it.

What a magnificent f*****g morning, I thought, in the general direction of no one.

Third floor. A boy I'd never spoken to held out a fish-shaped eraser as I passed — the kind you find in children's stationary sets — and smiled the smile of someone enormously pleased with themselves.

Deia: "Cheers."

I took it. Dropped it in my bag without breaking stride. He looked profoundly disappointed that I hadn't crumbled, which was the only thing that felt like a victory today, and it was a very small one, and I was rationing it carefully.

I found the bathroom at the end of the east corridor — the one nobody really used because the third stall had been broken since probably forever and the light above the sink flickered in a way that suggested it too was having a difficult year.

I stood at the sink.

I ran the cold water.

I looked at myself.

Right, I said to the reflection, which had the decency to look as terrible as I felt.

Right. You are not going to do this here. You are not going to spiral in the flickering bathroom on the third floor over a fish that you brought of your own volition and a rumour about your own anatomy. You are not going to give this building that.

The reflection looked unconvinced.

I know, I told it. Me too. But we've got class in six minutes so pull it together, you vacuous cockalorum!

I use old English I so joyously studied in seventh grade sometimes to distract myself from things. I really needed a distraction.

I splashed water on my face.

I went to class.

I retained nothing.

Professor Aldaine spoke for seventy-four minutes about something that was presumably important and I sat in the fourth row and watched his mouth move and wrote three words in my notebook — distribution, marginal, Tuesday — which I later assessed were not connected to each other in any meaningful way whatsoever.

A masterpiece of academic engagement.

Frame it.

The girl beside me smelled of something floral and expensive and kept her eyes scrupulously forward in the manner of someone who had heard the rumours and made a territorial decision about proximity. God I hate people.

I drew a small fish in the margin of my notebook.

Then I scribbled it out.

Then I drew it again.

Why did you draw it again?

I didn't know. I genuinely didn't know.

After class, the corridor again.

I was almost at the stairs when I heard it — not directed at me, not quite, but angled, the way cruelty angles itself when it wants deniability.

Bitch 1: "God what is that smell."

Bitch 2: "Probably just someone's lunch."

Bitch 1: "Or someone's lucky charm."

I have no idea where they would've gotten that from — that the fish was a lucky charm — but it didn't matter. Laughter. Clean, bright, social laughter, the kind that costs nothing to produce and a great deal to receive. I kept walking. Down the stairs. Through the lobby. Past the security desk. Out the door. I didn't decide to leave. I simply did not stop.

The ride back was cold in the specific way Seattle gets cold when it's decided you've had enough — not dramatic, not stormy, just a flat grey mean that settles into your jacket and stays. How I hadn't cried yet was beyond me. Maybe I was stronger than I thought. Maybe my brain was still buffering, still loading the full implications of the day like a webpage with too many tabs open.

My hands were pale and numb on the handlebars. I hadn't even noticed until I saw them.

Grandma Saoirse was buried in Resthaven Cemetery on the east side, in a plot beneath a hawthorn tree that dropped white petals every May with no concern for whether anyone was there to see it. I came when I needed to, which was more often than I'd like to admit and less often than I probably should.

The grass was wet. I sat on it anyway.

The headstone was simple — name, dates, and the single line she'd requested herself, which read — She fed everyone who came through her door, which was true and also said more about her than any obituary had managed.

I sat with my bag in my lap and the cold coming up through the ground and I didn't say anything for a while. That was okay. She'd always been comfortable with silence, which was part of why I'd loved her.

Eventually…

Deia: "I brought fish to school."

The hawthorn tree said nothing.

Deia: "For luck. You used to say fish were lucky, do you remember that? You said it once, I think you were talking about something else entirely but I wrote it down in my head and apparently I took it extremely literally because I brought an actual fish to campus in a jar and it shattered in the bathroom and I had to flush it and now the entire school thinks I store marine life in my body cavities."

Wind moved through the grass.

Deia: "I know. I know. You would've laughed until you cried and then you would've made me tea and told me it didn't matter and I would've believed you, which is the thing, that's the thing — I would've believed you. You were the only person I could believe that from."

I picked at the grass beside the headstone. Pulled a single blade and turned it between my fingers. The sky above the hawthorn had gone the pale amber of late afternoon, the kind that makes everything look briefly like it's been painted rather than lived in. It had stopped raining.

Seattle, in a rare moment of grace, was almost beautiful.

Deia: "I miss you. That's the whole thing. That's really the whole thing."

I sat there until the amber became violet and the violet became the specific dark that means you've stayed longer than you planned and the ground beneath you is more cold than you'd noticed and your jeans are wet through and you're going to feel that on the ride home.

I stayed a little longer anyway.

She deserved that much, at minimum.

Home was dark when I unlocked it.

I didn't turn the lights on.

I sat on the floor with my back against the bed — not in the bed, on the floor, because the floor felt correct in the specific way that only floors feel when you've had a day like this one — and I proceeded to think about absolutely nothing very hard for a long time.

Lucky charm, she'd said. Or I'd invented she'd said. Betwixt memory and grief there's a territory where the two become indistinguishable and I'd been living there since she died.

Some charm.

I didn't cry dramatically. I didn't do anything dramatically. I just sat on the floor in the dark and let the weight of the day press down on me and existed inside it until it became something I could carry rather than something carrying me.

It took a while.

Work.

Right.

That.

I changed in the half dark. Uniform. Hair. The comfortable shoes. A granola bar above the sink — I didn't taste it. I found my keys by feel and my bag by memory and I stood at the door for a moment with my hand on the frame.

Aldy caught the last of the streetlight through the window.

Deia: "Don't die while I'm gone."

I stepped out into the Seattle dark.

The rain had started again.

Of course it had.