FISH OIL
There was something rotting on the white kitchen tile
of the farmhouse blown straight through like a tornado.
Doll-housed, cake-sliced, coated in a layer of snow white
dandruff. She lay across the floor the way pretty things
always know how. Scaled head to fish fin—flayed.
Poor creature. Caught dead, forever winking, puffy eyed,
purple and flesh red. Something green about her. Something
forever gone. Something high school science fair experiment.
There was a love letter there. A dedication to this horrible, oh,
fantastic bitter thing. Signature drawn deep in her belly. Crudely done.
A thickness in the air of lonely wandering, stinking hormones,
painted ruddy-cheeked boy who should have
been slashed across the face by clawed fingers, the choice weapon
of his girl frankenstein seafood delight party trick.
The boy remembers her as ropes and delight, ideations
as mundane as flopping away. As a specimen, an act of God.
Of all evolution and science and discovery, the boy found
nothing more joyous than his precious sun-drowned thing.
He spread out the scales weekly in bars full of clay. Sweat
melting ice cubes drowning in the heat as he’s sculpting away earth.
Painting with blood that can never fully dry. Pay me thirty to take
this gift between your fingers. Not much of a salesman
All the awkwardness of a sea-legged man.
She is lost in the translation of deep ocean to sand and salt.
Though the scales are eternal. Sitting in corners of nightstands
never dulling. Collecting dust, like some good luck talisman.
Before, when it was not too late, when she had not puffed up
raisined, been used like a giving tree. The thing, shivering,
spit out the oil building up in her veins. Let her blood spread slow,
thick like jam across the sticky linoleum. Put the curse on his head,
let it take its time like rotting would. Revenge the only desperate
funeral she could give herself.
Tonight, the boy falls from his stool in the kitchen onto stained
tile. The sea leaves his mouth like a tempest. Left behind an ecosystem
of meat turned coral. Angelfish and piranhas alike finding home amongst
his vertebrae. Lay the caviar in his clavicle. When they find him
he’s named the human ocean. An act of holy creation and the art of man.
The bones—left beneath the sink, forever dripping—shiver.
Megan Archibeque, 23, Chicago - USA ✯ IG: @meganarchibeque
“Megan Archibeque dreams of writing a novel in every genre. She's currently writing about escaping hometowns, exploring strange worlds, theatre troupes living in abandoned mansions and girlhood always.”