Mangled Pike Spotted by Kiddie Pool by Faye Wikner
The young narrator of Faye Wikner’s “Mangled Pike Spotted by Kiddie Pool” is being taught, by her father, to fish. The reader meets her at age five, and then “some age after that”—she is so young she tells us that “there is no greater fear in my life than a fish finding my toes in the cold water by the dock. Or a shark some fifty meters out where everything gets darker and colder and stranger.” In this essay, a memory piece, told almost exclusively in present tense, Wikner juxtaposes the innocence of the young child with the harsh truths that await them in the real world.
In addition to emphasizing the child’s tender age, Wikner also reminds the reader of the emotional untidiness of childhood that we eventually outgrow. When given permission to keep a pike in her little pool, the narrator knows, “I should feel sorry, but I don’t. I am mesmerized by its circling, circling, circling, circling” in its new enclosure, sentenced to “loop around, over and over.” When the pike is killed by birds overnight, Wikner allows her child narrator very little sentimentality. She is simply back in the fishing boat the next morning, eager for her father’s care and attention.
In the craft essay “Creative Lies I Tell My Nonfiction Students,” Liz Stephens writes about the struggle to examine memory in creative nonfiction, especially in light of who we have become later in life: “Don’t we all have this? Both the mocking knowledge that we’ll never know how we were formed emotionally…and also that we cannot live without that integral try to call it back and know it?” Faye Wikner’s young narrator may subconsciously know and foreshadow danger, in her home and in the world, but she lives fully in the moment. It’s a time and a place where, to her father, she is “the whole world.” And the birds that threaten the pike in the kiddie pool are still out of a child’s line of sight. —CRAFT
When the fish is dead, it lies in the shallow of water that never goes away, in the dirt, the remnants of blood from my forefinger where I pricked myself four times over, maybe some from that pike, too. I’m five when Dad shows me how to hold a perch head at the right angle to reclaim the fishhook from its stiff, jutting bottom lip. Some age after that, he shows me how to snap its neck so it won’t flop over once, refusing death, then twice again, and I stare at it, just another smear of something ocean-y on the bottom of the boat. The fish stares back at me, and now there is no greater fear in my life than a fish finding my toes in the cold water by the dock. Or a shark some fifty meters out where everything gets darker and colder and stranger. The fish stares back at me. It probably wishes it were some fifty meters out where everything is darker and colder and stranger. It is probably getting cold now, anyway.
I am not cold; I’m wearing my uncle’s teal-and-purple zip-up jacket that never lets any wind through. The fish continues staring back at me. Is it jealous? My dad revs the engine and I turn to the wake; instead, the toes of my boots nudged up to the three perches now graveyarding in my dad’s fishing boat.
Dad takes the perches onto the lawn by the dock, and behind me are still waters and the crammed noise of reeds stirring along the shore. I might be five, or seven. Younger, even, too young to be allowed to hold the knife, but I can watch, and I always do. He kneels in his jeans and the small part of me that has seen prayers remembers what worship looks like as he cradles the fish with one hand and that metal tooth with the other, making sure to catch my eye before he slices. It always amazes me. There are so many things on the ground, all of them pink and beige and putrid, but my favorite part is when scales bite a gleam off the grass, cutting into the green. For a second, the scales are the color of my dad’s hair. The only color I’ve ever known: gray. And thinner at the temples, the same shade as his scruff of a beard. Dad can do anything and he shows me.
Later on, my aunt is going to cook all those perches into a dinner that I won’t eat because I can stomach the smell of them basking in the boat but not in a kitchen. Dad doesn’t make me eat. An easy hand around a beer bottle, empty plate in front of him. He’s always smiling at me. I am the whole world and I know it: he’s shown me.
Maybe I saw the temper in the twitch of his fingers around the bottle’s neck. Maybe I wanted my own temper smithed differently.
I asked to keep a pike, once, just the baby one, long and elegant, taut on my line. Can’t we keep it? We have a kiddie pool. We can keep it in there, can’t we? And I’ll feed it perches and little fish from by the dock and when we go home I’ll set it back into the water. And he doesn’t tell me no, and it stays alive on the dirty bottom of that boat where all the other fish go to die, and he carries it in a white plastic bucket until the kiddie pool is filled up. I yanked lily pads from the surface as I drifted back home and placed them carefully in the pool. Watching the pike loop around, over and over, I should feel sorry, but I don’t. I am mesmerized by its circling, circling, circling, circling.
Twelve hours and the lily pads can’t help the pike against the birds patrolling the lawn, anymore. I catch sight of the head where it glistens to the right of the pool that next day and stare at it, but I never see any other pieces, no pinks or beiges or putrids. My aunt says she’s not sure what I expected, but Dad doesn’t say anything when he cleans the mess up.
Next sunrise I’m wearing my uncle’s jacket again, shuffling down the soggy path and over the rained-on grass to get to the boat. Dad has spread out a coat on the seat so I won’t get too cold, but I don’t mind the chill because when the world rains in the mornings, when everything is barely there, it’s like a sheet of noise that makes everything else quiet. Someone’s turned the light on in the kitchen on the bottom floor of the family summer house up the hill. Shifting in my seat, I watch Dad. Here’s how you hitch a worm properly, he points at my fishhook with a steady finger. I mimic.
The first catch of the day is mine, a tiny perch that’s victory-heavy in my hands, enough for a smile. My dad smiles, too. Toss this one out, he says, and I do, listening to the loud splash as it takes off into the depths. Cold water licks my fingertips, ghosts of all the fish I’ve held. Against the single, tiny island in the distance, my dad cuts a sharp silhouette, ageless and unkillable. He pats my knee and asks if I need gloves. I tell him I don’t. I put two perches on the bottom of the boat. We return home in silence.
The pike’s fish head is discarded by the road now, carried away and then abandoned by some eager bird. Dad’s eyes are on the road ahead, but mine linger on the mangle, on its skinny bones that look like fingers wanting to be held. He doesn’t ask about it, and I don’t bring it up. He holds the door for me and I follow him inside, and when I take my shoes off I catch him staring out the window, fingers closing around something invisible.
FAYE WIKNER is an MFA student and graduate assistant at William Paterson University of New Jersey. She is an editorial assistant at Map Literary and a prose reader for The Adroit Journal. Find her poetry at The Rumen, and find her on Twitter @userxofy.
Featured image by Andrey Trusov, courtesy of Unsplash.
