Shelter in Place #4: “Milkfish” and “Reconnecting…”
Milkfish
BY SOPHIA MARUSIC ’21
I went back home like I was told. Maybe I didn’t remember how
cold March can be at home. No one is out. The pink and white
magnolias open anyway. I drop toilet tissue at my Lolo’s house
and listen to him tell his same stories through the storm door.
Have you ever taken your boots off to realize they’re full of someone else’s
blood? I tell him no over and over, lie down on the doorstep, and
watch the fog eat on the glass. Here’s the quietest thing I’ve ever
heard: once, I went to a runoff lake in the desert we had heard about,
just to see. The shore was mostly fish bone and there was only silence.
My breathing was the loudest thing for miles. I drive home and the
roads are bare like a woman taking off her sweater to reveal naked
shoulders that are thin as fish spines. At home again
and my mother
is taking our things and spray painting them into solid brightness
in our garage. The chair next to my father’s desk is a neon pink
hole of where a chair used to be. I cough into my elbow and
it’s aerosolized cyan. Before I left, Lolo said, Have you ever
dynamite fished in Iligan Bay? so I tried to tell him about the lake
in the desert and every rotting dead thing I had seen floating,
but most of all about the quiet. The pause. The invisible scale
of it all. His oxygen tank hummed and then three quick clicks.
Everything stretched out still and hot and smooth like a great
rock cleaved in two.
Shelter in Place is a new series featuring student artists’ and writers’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.