Dead Fish Museum

The High Divide At the Home I'd get up early, when the Sisters were still asleep, and head to the ancient Chinese man's store. The ancient Chinese man was a brown, knotted, shriveled man who looked like a chunk of gingerroot and ran one of those tiny stores that sells grapefruits, wine, and toilet paper, and no one can ever figure out how they survive. But he survived, he figured it out. His ancient Chinese wife was a little twig of a woman who sat in a chair and never said a word. He spoke only enough English to conduct business, to say hello and goodbye, to make change, although every morning, when I came for my grapefruit, I tried to teach him some useful vocabulary. I came out of the gray drizzle through the glass door with the old Fishback Appliance Repair sign still stenciled on it, a copper cowbell clanging above me, and the store was cold, the lights weren't even on. I went to the bin and picked through the grapefruits and found one that wasn't bad, a yellow ball, soft and square from sitting too long in the box, and then I went to the counter. The Chinese man wasn't there. His tiny branchlike wife was sitting in her chair, all bent up. I searched my pockets for show, knowing all along that I'd be a little short. I came up with twenty-seven cents, half a paper clip, a pen cap, and a ball of blue lint. I put the money in her hand and she stared at it. By the lonesome sound my nickels and pennies made when she sorted them into their slots I also knew that the till was empty. I looked behind her through the beaded curtain to the small apartment behind the shop. Next to the kitchen sink was an apple with a bite out of it, the bite turned brown like an old laugh. I held my grapefruit, tossed it up in the air, caught it. Where is he? I asked. She was chewing on a slice of ginger and offered me a piece, which I accepted. In the morning, they chewed ginger instead of drinking coffee. Husband? I said. She blinked and spat on the floor.Meiyou xiwang, she said.Meiyou xiwang. She folded her hands, tangling the tiny brown roots together.Meiyou xiwang, she said, touching her heart, and sending her hands flying apart. Her singsong voice beat an echo against the bare walls. Her hands flapped like a bat. I shook my head. Meiyou xiwang, she insisted. Huh? I said, but I knew we could go on forever not making any sense. She hugged herself, like she was cold. I didn't know what to say. She'd traveled all this way, she'd left China and crossed the ocean and come to Bremerton and opened a little store and put grapefruit in the bins and Mogen David on the shelves, but she'd gone too far, because now she couldn't tell anybody what was happening to her anymore. I had two projects at the Home. I was reading the encyclopedia, working through the whole circle of learning available to man, as the introduction said. I'd started with Ignatius Loyola, because I'm named after him, and the Inquisition, and this led me right into the topic of torture. My other project involved learning Latin so I could be an altar boy. I got the idea one morning at Sacred Heart while I was staring at the cold altar and the Cross and winking at the nailed-up Christ to see if He'd wink back. Our priest said that he didn't go for the vernacular because it was vulgar. If you were God Eternal, he said, would you want to listen to such yowling? He said that everything in the Church was a sign for something else, and a priest was a man who knew all the signs, but an altar boy knew a few of them, too. I looked around the sanctuary. With the snowy marble slab of altar, the gilt dome of the tabernacle and its tiny doors, the chalices and cruets, the fresh-cut flowers, the sparkling candD'Ambrosio, Charles is the author of 'Dead Fish Museum ', published 2007 under ISBN 9781400077939 and ISBN 1400077931.