I was fifteen. It was Halloween. Also, the eve of my parents’ divorce. My parents asked what we should do for Halloween, since it was our last holiday together as a family. My brother shrugged, then suggested we get a Filet-O-Fish. My father said, “No trick-or-treating?” and my brother said, “We’re too old for that.” My mother squeezed my shoulder. She said, “Alright then, let’s go.” We went through the drive-thru and ate in the car on the way back home. Lights passed over our faces. There was the Big Lots and Jiffy Lube, the Aldi and Ultra Tan. My father drove with one hand. He ate with the other. Ariana Grande came on the radio and my brother said, “Check it,” and I said, “What?” and he said, “It looks like the moon has a pulse.” We put our finger on it. The glass was cold.
At home, it felt like we’d never been gone at all. “Where did the time go?” no one asked. “What happened?” “Why?” “I’m full,” my father said, grunting. He sat on the couch and hugged a pillow. The pillow absorbed his burp. My mother wouldn’t look at him, not anymore, and I knew that this night was a gift to us, my brother and me, and the point was to say goodbye to the family that we had been. We had become fish in time. I smelled my shirt. It smelled like fish, like fry. It smelled like where we had been. My mother said, “What now?” and ghosts descended on the neighborhood. I peeked through a window. From a distance, they looked like napkins draped over forks. Captain America knocked at the door. Deadpool and Star Lord, too. I said, “Let’s play dead,” and no one argued. We didn’t have any candy to hand out, only an extra Filet-O-Fish making grease in a paper bag.
Outside, flashlights scanned cracks in the sidewalk. I didn’t have to see it to know. Those were my handprints in the concrete. My brother’s, too. “Hurry,” I said, and we dispersed like fish. Fish flop when they die and are still once they’re dead. They breathe oxygen but live in water. They’re beautiful but stink. I said, “Hurry,” and we did. My mother slid in the tub with her clothes on and pulled up her sleeves. My brother stood on a chair in the closet and rigged up a belt. My father and I went out in the garage and got in the car. He ran tubing from the exhaust pipe through a crack in the driver’s side window. He turned on the car and leaned back in his seat. He said, “You go inside in a minute,” and I said, “Sure,” although I didn’t move. I was still opening my gift after all, hour after hour, minute by minute, and had not yet said goodbye. I said, “What’s that?” and my father said, “They’re on the roof.” Yoda went, “Yeet,” and Spiderman said, “Give me something good to eat.” I could have been out there with them, if I had still been one of them, a child.
“Too bad the machine was broken,” my father said. “I wouldn’t have minded ice cream.” My eyes were closed and I assumed that his were, too. I could hear it in his voice. His eyes were closed in his voice. I said, “There’s an app that tells you which machines are broken,” and he said, “Show me,” and then my voice closed, too. All I could do was scroll through my phone in my mind. The app said everything is, if not broken, then breaking. I saw us in my camera roll, my mother and father and brother and me. We rolled like fish on the line. I saw us then and now, rolled like fish in flour.
We tried to catch our own supper once, during a holiday we’d taken together as a family. On the first day at the lake house, we got sunburned casting from the floating dock. Not one bite. Bitter, we burned. Finally my father said, “We’re going,” and my mother said, “Alright then, let’s go.” We drove twenty minutes to the nearest McDonalds, where we ordered half a dozen Filet-O-Fish sandwiches and ate in the car, ravenous until we weren’t. My mother passed out napkins. Sweat was trapped in bubbles on her hands. Tartar sauce starred the corner of our mouths, sparkling, and soft bread and cheese caught in our teeth. I said, “Thank you,” and my brother did, too. She said, “You’re welcome, both of you,” and my father thanked her, too. She looked at him funny. She said, “What for?” He said, “Oh, I don’t know.” The same smile passed across all of our faces. We were playing dead until we weren’t playing anymore. That’s when they took off our costumes and saw us for what we were.
Wynne Hungerford's fiction has appeared in Epoch, Subtropics, Blackbird, The Literary Review, The Brooklyn Review, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among other places. She received her MFA from the University of Florida.
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