Naknek 2023

In the salmon factory, all I could smell was the fragrance of cooking fish from the canning lines. That’s how freshly dead they were.

The machine that gutted the salmon didn’t always do it perfectly. It wrecked the spines or made their flesh gelatinous or did a bad job of removing the heads. So it’d send them down on a conveyor belt for us to fix.

Yatiana was three years younger than me, from Mexico, spoke a handful of English. One of her favorite phrases was ‘easy money!’ After a rush hour of sawing off half-broken heads and flicking off fins, we’d shove accumulated heaps of organs to the floor to slither down the pipes that flushed into the bay. At the docks, you could sometimes see the seagulls chasing the flotsam during low tide.

Usually, it was a boring job. I liked to play a game of guessing which salmon had cancer in order to kill time. A doctor probing the contents of her patient’s flayed-open belly, which mutations, which discolorations, which bumpy lumps of tumor—these I had to delicately excise so the body could be restored to full honor and health. Some of my patients had mottled green-blue pigmentation between the crevices of their scales. Others were so large they measured over two feet from head to tail and flopped down the sides of my cutting board. I imagined delivering the sorry news to their families.

When the machine worked well, it worked beautifully. We’d stand in place like aesthetes enthralled by the endlessly stocked aisles of a supermarket, watching the fish go in and come out pageant-ready. So, it was only plastic surgery in the end that they needed. Something about those final, bifurcating slices reminded me of a story I once read about giving mermaids legs.