Catch by MacKenzie Dietz
Associate editor Zoa Coudret on today’s bonus story: The clarity and groundedness of “Catch” almost make you forget it’s a fairy tale. With beautiful sentences and a heart-rending situation, the story spills beyond the boundaries of the page that tries to contain it.
Catch
“My mind is a sieve,” Mom says when I ask her to tell me about the old days with my aunties. The dishes are clean, but she’s still hunkered over the kitchen sink. The tap runs through her knotted fingers.
“You remember,” I say. “You used to dance.” On a blue-gray beach with her sisters, circling a snapping bonfire. Sparks and their laughter glittered skyward. Drops of seawater spiraled down from their hair. Mussel shells broke under their feet.
“Dance?” she says, a rasp in her voice. “Me?” Maybe she’s being evasive, maybe not. It’s getting harder to tell. She’s been walking the earth so long.
“You remember.” When the moon crowned their silky heads in moonlight, my mother and her sisters would step back into their sealskins and dive, sated, past my father’s crab pots.
My mother turns the water off and dries her palms on her t-shirt; two wet smears appear under a jaunty Mickey Mouse. She tries to twirl, but totters.
“Just call me Ginger Rogers,” she says, jazz hands wavering like branch coral.
“Forget it,” I say. “Come sit so I can check your vitals.”
*
I know the story by heart.
One night, my father, who so feared death he couldn’t fall asleep alone, rowed out under the full moon to check the traps. He spotted the selkies’ smoke, paddled ashore, and snatched up a silver pelt. In its velvet, the meltwater of glaciers met iron forged in long-dead stars. But my father, lifting the fur to his cheek, could smell only his own longing.
The skin belonged to my mother. Sure he’d return it, he told her, if she’d come home with him, share his bed, bear him sons, learn his mother’s chowder recipe, and teach him to sit with his feelings.
My aunties swam home, bereft. My father hid the silver pelt away somewhere.
After numerous miscarriages, my mother bore a daughter, me. Then more losses. She made the chowder every Sunday for years, but my father ran off with an exotic dancer with long lavender hair. Used to be a mermaid, he claimed, until she laid eyes on him, then she walked out of the surf peeling scales from her hips like she was born to strip.
Mom and I scoured the place. There was no sign of her sealskin.
She raised me alone. At night, I drifted off to the sound of her bath running. Some mornings I’d find her asleep on the couch, clutching an empty chips bag—vinegar and sea salt. As time went on, her hair turned brittle, floating in wisps around her face. The light drained from her eyes.
*
“Land sakes,” Mom says, but she does as I ask—sits, drops her wrist into my open hand. I will never get over the give of her flesh under my fingertips, so cool and willing to fall away from the bone.
Last week, I tried my father one last time. He left the ex-mermaid a few years back for a whitewater naiad who played dueling pianos. Blond. Young too, as far as nymphs go, he told me, a real catch. He said the stripper had turned herself into sea foam to spite him.
He answered from the bar. Piano chords sloshed in the background. “Hey, skipper! Missed you at the gender reveal.” He and the naiad were expecting twins. “Two sons, count ‘em! Ha!”
“It’s serious now,” I told him.
“Think you’ll make it down for the shower?”
“Dad, her skin.”
“Look,” he said. “Your mother can’t hold onto things, that’s on her.” Then, louder, “Play ‘Barracuda’ baby!”
My eyes close when I find my mother’s pulse, and I wade alone into the slow, dark current. Her heartbeats slip past my fingertips. I want to collect them up in my skirt. Tidepools gather on my cheeks.
“That old thing wouldn’t fit anymore, anyway,” she says. Her voice is a wave sucked back into the sea, pulling stones over stones.
MacKenzie Dietz is a writer and freelance developmental editor living in Iowa City. She is currently at work on her first novel.
