Tobiko

by Bud Cannizzo

In my dream, mud settled in graded layers on the shallow riverbed, swirling as my scaly tummy passed just above. The dead plants sunk into the silt but refused to rot, growing furred with green algae. My fins churned plumes of mud from the soft ground as I dawdled, my search slowed by my swollen belly. I woke up gasping for breath––ran to my bathroom and turned on the faucet, let the water run over my hands, my neck, my hair, my mouth, then spit into the sink to get the mud taste out. 

The change began the night after I went fishing. The sky was cloudy, which Maya said was perfect, because they can’t see you moving above the water. I had never considered the perspective of a fish looking above the water onto land, and I turned it over in my mind as I gathered Maya’s bamboo rod and hooks. I went to the river early on her advice. Worms were out enjoying the wet morning earth, and I plucked them from the ground and onto my hook, still wriggling. 

The river was a small, slow, freshwater affair, dotted with the occasional flat of cattails and reeds. I kicked off my plastic slippers and walked down the slope of the tilted concrete slab that served as a dock for kayaks or, in the low traffic hours of the morning, a nursery for the bravest of black tadpoles. I cast my line, double knotted at one end to the pole. The surface of the water was still, but I could see the mud swirling below, green drifting plants and eyeless creatures settling in for the day. The tadpoles, emboldened, gathered on my toes. The gentle current pulsed life into the water itself. 

When I pulled the fish out of the water, it thrashed so furiously that I thought its lip would tear and it would fall back in. Its whole body was a single long, convulsing muscle, light gray, its fins membranous and furious. I held it in one hand and it flapped, pounding its tail against my fist. It had swallowed the hook, and as I pulled it from the flesh, gently at first and then roughly, it’s mouth filled with blood. I never knew fish bled. It’s gills heaved, and my breath was fast and shallow, panic rising as I realized, as only someone who has never killed before can, that it wasn’t just going to die. The men in the videos said to stab it in the brain, quick and merciful. But hesitation made me cruel. The blow from my kitchen knife bounced off, breaking skin and scraping off a few scales, leaving my prey still thrashing and gasping. I had wounded it too badly to release back into the water, but it wasn’t lying limp and patient, like I had expected, waiting for death. It thrashed. I was paralyzed, feeling it’s mouth open and close, its strong fins smack against my wet, bloody hands. I stabbed it in the gills again, and again, and again. Still, it moved. When a piece of it’s skin that I had hacked off clung to my still clenched fist, I recoiled and dropped the fish in the grass. I turned away as it writhed, unable to watch it’s death throes. 

After an age, the sound of movement finally stopped. The fish was still and bloodied, in death a mere piece of meat. I carried it to the wooden picnic table, scarred by years of knives and worn smooth by scrubbed off blood. I did just as Maya instructed: Lay it on it’s back, slice from the bottom of the tummy to the gills. But when I pushed in the knife, something was wrong. I opened the fish one inch, then two inches, and something began to spill out. Pale and soft as

freshwater foam, thousands of light eggs. Some were attached to a membrane, but many were free to roll and glob as I looked in grief at the work of my hands. I scooped out the eggs, first with my knife and then with my fingers, along with the slick organs, rosy pink and warm brown. I sloughed off the scales with the back of my knife and buried the lot, scales, guts, eggs and all. 

Later, I cooked and ate the fish. I sliced the muscle from her bones, sliced her head from her body, sliced her limbs from her sides. Her white flesh grew soft and hot on the cast iron skillet. That night, I dreamed of mud. 

After that day, I began to feel shifting in my body––a coiling and uncoiling. I woke choking on air most mornings, which devolved into retching over the toilet, my body convulsing, then twitching, then still. I was often too sick to eat before noon, but in the evenings I craved kale, then dried, salted meat, then fresh seaweed. 

My social life stalled. Mail and texts piled up: obligatory check ins from family members, emails from work, a bank statement. They were like stories from someone else’s life, or advertisements for a vacation on distant shores. Maya called me twice: once, soon after the fishing trip, to ask me if I caught anything, and once to ask me if I wanted to go out for dinner. 

No, I didn’t catch anything, and yes, I want to go out for dinner, but I’m not feeling up to it right now. 

Her second call came two weeks after I caught the fish. By then, the changes were impossible to ignore. My breasts were tender, my nipples dark and hard. I slept for twelve to fourteen hours at a time, waking up to eat, drink, and worry. 

In my more lucid moments, I googled my symptoms and waited with bated breath as the webpages loaded. PMS, pregnancy, ovarian cancer. I bought a pack of urine tests and took three, all negative. I browsed local doctors, drafted emails and never sent them, my reasoning having returned. I didn’t need help. I could handle it on my own. What was two weeks’ malaise? 

Two weeks spun into three. My daily sickness subsided, replaced by a near constant need to pee. I wandered through my home, sedate, drifting. I filled with breath, a hard stone in my tummy, my face and abdomen bloating. My period came and went with nothing to show but brown stains: dried blood, or silt. Throughout my transformation, one constant remained: my dreams of muddy riverbed, which had begun as confusing, became a respite. I looked forward each night to the peaceful rapture of searching, weightless and swollen, gulping cold, muddy water. 

I woke up on a warm, humid morning by the feeling of my belly splitting. I rolled from my bed and fell, tangled in my sweat soaked and reeking sheets. I struggled, beached, a fish stranded on cotton and linoleum shores, until the wave ebbed. I steeled myself and stumbled to the bathroom, closed the door and opened all the taps. The hot and cold streams of the sink and bathtub pounded in my ears, a current smashing the riverbank, as the pressure inside me rose again to breaking. I slipped into the filling tub like a trance. 

I was filled with sound-–a scream, was it my voice? My senses dissolved into the scream that came from me, or perhaps the other way around. My body thrashed, and I waited with bated breath at the cusp. The moment unspooled as I gasped, deep and fast, to no avail. My chest

heaved, but my breath never came––I was strangling in room air. And from somewhere on the edges of my mind I felt something new entirely. Splitting lines, carved along a lovers trail from my ears to the base of my neck. I clapped my hand to the spot and felt slits widen beneath my fingers, spasming like my futile breathing. Like a new kind of breath. I slid my head under the surface and filled my gills with water. 

After all my practice, the process was familiar, washing over me in a comforting flood. I drifted, carried by the current, pushing back in places to investigate––a pile of rocks, a tangle of weeds. After all the dreams, I finally understood what I was looking for. The strangling and sound was a distant memory from another life, another body. My new form was slick and swollen, and I gleefully filtered river water through my gills as I searched for a place to lay my eggs. The water swirled, rich with dirt, and new shapes loomed ahead like creatures from another world, resolving as I neared into leaves, stems, plastic. I knew I had found the spot before I even saw it––I felt the current slow around me, obstructed by the sturdy root mat of a reed patch. Though it was my first clutch, I knew exactly what to do. Laying my eggs was as natural as breathing. 

My other body’s eyes snapped open, the usual underwater sting gone. The shallow metal rectangle of the world was bright and distorted, the thundering pulse of the sink tap muffled to the back of my brain. I was enveloped in two feet of water, suspended. After spending my whole life stooped under the heavy coat of the earth’s atmosphere, I finally arrived home and slipped it off. The running tap twisted my legs and hips, compressing and uncoiling slightly, like the breath of some great beast. Like something from deep in the sea’s hot vents and caverns, waking up for the first time. 

I burst out from under the water, my lungs burning, and drank the air in gulps. The tub and sink had overflown, taps still gushing, water pooling on the floor and leaking out from under the bathroom door and into the hallway. My neck was smooth and unbroken under my hands. And sunk in the bathtub was a jellylike mass the size of a torso: thousands of tiny eggs, bound in a slick membrane. I held my spawn gently, careful not to dislodge any eggs from the matrix, the muddy reed patch a portent stamped in my mind. I planted my blessing like a kiss––daughters, grow strong.

Bud Cannizzo (they/them) is a junior at SUNY New Paltz. They love Ursula Le Guin and Samuel Delaney.

Illustration by Matt Lambert