Free The Death of Small Creatures by Trisha Cull Page B

of whatever he’s doing.
    I feel burned, even from this distance. I know what burnt flesh feels like, and somehow this knowledge is enough.
    The glass in the French doors at the front of the suite is clouding with steam from the basmati rice and broccoli simmering in the kitchen. The copper pots hanging from the pot rack have likewise developed a feverish glow.
    Leigh is making dinner—baked salmon with honey Dijon mustard glaze. He is chewing something, as always when he makes dinner, always chewing contentedly some sprig or vegetable stalk, some carrot chunk that was destined to never see the cool fold of a lettuce leaf. Sometimes I think I hate him for it, whatever it is he thinks he’s doing over there with that fish, that sprig of something in his mouth, like I can’t help but hate him for being a contented forty-something man whose cellular memory contains no trace of thousands of years of self-deprecation, who has been propelled into the twenty-first century with a butcher knife in his hand, food in his mouth and joy in his disposition. He’s so goddamned cheerful.
    Is it as simple as his relationship to a well-balanced meal—the vitamins in his body, the nutrients in his blood and his self-professed peculiarity of never having dreamed at night? Yet there is no denying his goodness. There is no denying my love for him.
    There is another fish nailed to the wall above our General Electric chrome microwave. The fish’s head and tail are made of chrome too, but the body is made of maple, so the completed fish seems to be the victim of a disjointed vision of an artist struggling to reconcile the industrial era with the deepest quadrants of the ocean. I call it our Christ fish. It’s a fish whose heart is trapped between the mechanical grind of its head and ass. It’s a fish whose initial purpose was to be a cutting board, but Leigh and I decided it was better suited for display, ornamental, a kind of crucifix. You could, however, lay the cutting board fish horizontally and place a real fish on it in order to perform the gutting process—the long slice up the belly, beginning at the small puckered orifice up the length of its body to the throat, followed by the removal of the guts and the satisfying extraction of the skeletal system in one deft tug.
    Leigh is using a square wooden cutting board instead, cheerfully concentrating over his fish as he makes the final two cuts, uncannily reserved for last—the head and tail. The chopping off of the thick tail feels more barbaric than the hack at the fish’s neck, perhaps having something to do with the animal’s method of propulsion being so suddenly and violently amputated. It seems to still retain the ability to think and feel without the head, as if its true essence emanates from its shiny silver scales, and its brutalized body is still whispering, defiant and headless from the slab,
I have swum blind up a thousand rivers before
.
    As Leigh positions the fish onto the cookie sheet and tenderly brushes the creature with honey Dijon, I think,
That fish isn’t going anywhere
.

    In earlier times, the engagement ring was a partial payment for the bride, and a pledge of the groom’s intentions. Later, the ring represented clarity; its brilliance reflected innocence and purity. Its strength signalled enduring love. The ring is worn on the third finger of the left hand. The vein in this finger was once believed to go directly to the heart.
    Until the fifteenth century, only kings wore diamonds; they wore them as a symbol of strength, courage and invincibility. The diamond was first discovered in India; here the diamond was valued more for its magic than its beauty and was believed to protect the wearer from fire, snakes, illnesses, thieves and evil.
    When our plates are cleared, I excuse myself to go to the washroom.
    The washroom feels like a little water closet; pristine white, a free-standing sink, two back walls opening