cassie boulis / editors' choice prize in essays

Gutted

Yesterday, Thea Georgia brought home a Greek sea bass as large as my smallest cousin. This morning, I am called into the kitchen. Knives the color of scales and just as sharp have been arranged on the table in front of me. “Today,” she tells me, “you will learn how to gut the fish.” The recipe we follow does not exist on paper; it’s written on Thea’s hands, which guide mine through the stomach of a fish. Her fervor is palpable; she is determined that your recipes outlive you. I keep my eyes trained forward, on the fish’s body. I do not look up. I reach for the knife. Even in the kitchen, I feel the weight of your gaze along my cutting arm.

At fifteen years old, I am disgusted. I ask why we can not buy the fish skinned, and Thea tells me, bluntly, that our family has respect for the things we eat, and that we are not ones to take the easy way out. “Even after the fish is gone,” she explains to me, “there is the body that remains.” This, I come to realize, is ingrained in our culture - we handle our meat with our hands, and in this way, do not forget the thin line that draws life into death. Out of respect for my aunt, I try to picture this fish as something more than a vessel for its meat.

There are worse things to endure than this operation. These days, I am pulled along in a current of grief. I think of the other things I have been asked to do this week: rinse the feeding tubes, wash the fecal matter off your sheets, and wipe the drool from your face. The fish, by comparison, is quite clean. Maybe a month ago, I would not have been able to maim a creature, but I think I can do it now. I look our fish in the eye, I put my hand through the gaping maw and hold it steadily. Then I cut. The translucent bones shine up at me like teeth. The heart slips out, and I run to the sink to throw up. On the way back to the table, dizzy from the vomit, I forget to keep my head down. I will not look at the room that used to house you. 

*

On October 17th, 2022, the photos from summer vacation arrived in the mail. Your family gathered at the table to inspect the still-sticky photographs. There was one of the four of you in your scuba gear, smiling in the crystal green bay of Vieques. Your daughter lingered on that photo, noticing your smile, visible yet hazy through the plastic of the mask. She looked you in the eye, back at the photo, then back to you. She points out the droop of your eyelid, and then the slight bow of your mouth - so minuscule is the difference that I do not think anyone would have noticed had we not been examining photos of your face, which had looked healthy just a couple of months earlier. The next day, the droop lingering on his mind, your husband decided to call my father, the neurosurgeon.

Three days later, you were rushed to the hospital.

*

I cannot tear my eyes away from the mess. When I eventually excuse myself to the bathroom to wash the skin off of me, I find that the smell lingers. The pungency of salt and decay permeates the entire home. Here, I learn that death doesn’t wash off. The fish, lying flat in front of me, is a mess of piss and shit and loose skin and one bulging eye. I wonder if you’d be proud of me, to learn that I’m finally taking an interest in the family recipe. You must know that I am only doing this for you, for your daughters, my cousins. It’s our family; we don’t take the easy way out.

*

You did not take the easy way out. In the months after your discharge, my father and I flew up to Pennsylvania to visit you. On our way to the house, we chopped a Christmas tree and wrapped it in a towel. One thing they don’t tell you is that when a matriarch lies dying in the living room, no one decorates the house for Christmas.

You really did not want to die. There was no sadness in your voice, just impatience. You did not have time for cancer. When the diagnosis was delivered, the family was gutted; you, however, were just frustrated. So you took my father to the side, and you begged him to cut it out of you - as if he could reach behind your eyes with a knife and pluck out the glioblastoma. You were his little sister; he wanted to protect you. He would have if he could. Did you know it almost killed him?

*

I watched my father trying to cure the incurable disease, the fundraising he did, the team he assembled. There was never going to be enough time. Still, in the “after,” he keeps the trials and test therapies going. Maybe someday he will make a breakthrough, but I think this would kill him, too. If he had been quicker, smarter, faster, would that have saved you? I do not know. I do know that there were many sleepless nights spent pacing, crying. I wish you could’ve realized that by choosing to live, you were drawing the life out of all of us.

Did you know that your death was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do?

*

August 14th, 2022. You had been keeping a secret for the past five months. The divorce papers had come from your lawyer. You were leaving small-town Pennsyltucky. Your daughters were grown. You were going to be free. Maybe you’d go back to school. Maybe you’d finally get to use that degree you’d gotten from Princeton. You had all the time in the world.

*

No one tells you how messy death can be. There are scales all over the kitchen table. They wink up at us from the floor tiles. None of us, not even Thea Georgia, understand how you ever prepared a branzino so effortlessly. The two of us spar with it; it bites down on the knife.

The skin, no longer holding the fish’s insides, droops grotesquely. Where it is still attached to the body, it is loose and falls awkwardly on the table. Without its fat, our branzino looks so small. I am reminded of you, the creature you became.

There are things that I want to say to you, the weighty promises of a fifteen-year-old kid: that I will keep your daughters safe, that I’ll be here to decorate for the holidays, that the song Landslide by Fleetwood Mac haunts me, that I miss you. But I’m better at staring down the shaft of the knife, and I don’t think I have the strength to be brave anymore.

*

June 7th, 2023. After you’re dead, I’ll realize I never said any of this to you. Maybe that’s why I’m writing it all down now. When they finally cart your empty bed out of the living room, I realize that now, that room is even harder to look at. I do not go in there anymore. It will never feel like a living room again.

And even though your frail, pale-white body is gone, the house is still haunted by you.

When a couple of pots fall from the wall, my father says that it’s you, calling out.

And even though I do not want to believe that you’re still angry, I do not know how you couldn’t be, after we discarded you. After my dad couldn’t save you.

After your daughters moved away.

After the walls started to peel and your catheter was thrown out with the trash, and your husband went on a first date, second date, third date…

When asked what I remember of those days, I will say this: bloodied spines, loose skin, cartilage, bulging glass eye, gaping mouth, blood, death, death, death.

I will also remember that you fought until your last moment alive - until you began choking on your spit and the doctors looked at you and then at each other and then away, because no one could ever look you in the eye.

Instead, I carved the eye out of a fish.

By the end, even your daughters craved the release, and when the knife fell, there was sadness, but at least it was over.

*

Dear Thea Ann: I didn’t take the easy way out. I skinned the fish. I stayed through the blood and the gore and the piss. I got my hands dirty. And when it was all over, we gathered around the table - the one that used to face your hospital bed. After the gutting, Thea Georgia prepared the fish with butter, and all of us, your relatives, were brought together to eat. We did not speak that night, after you died. Nothing unimportant had been left unsaid, and for everything else, it was too late. And so we sat there, we just sort of sat there and chewed on it.

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Cassie Boulis is a writer and photographer from Atlanta, Georgia.