Smoked Out
The fish arrive through the letter box. Yes, they’re dead. Not swimming in a plastic bag of tepid tap water or stuffed replica, trophies of a flyfishing trip. Not a side of salmon or potted anchovy paste trussed in the dry straw of a Fortnum’s hamper, but real fish, with bones and heads, tails, and fins still intact.
I can see they were sent from Whitby in Yorkshire. Whitby, where I went with you, stealing a weekend away.
We visited the Gothic Abbey where Dracula was dreamed into being, and you said I was Dracula’s bride and sunk your mouth on my neck, pretended to bite and suck my blood, saying you couldn’t get enough of the taste of me. And where we raced up the 199 steps to reach the Church of St Mary and arrived together, breathless, and heady and drank in the view. Where we studied strange snake stones, fossils, and Whitby jet mined from compressed ancestors of curious Monkey Puzzle Trees, made into glossy black jewellery, heavy with Victorian mourning. Jewellery you refused to buy for me, saying our love needed happier, brighter memorial.
We saw the port where Captain Cook set sail in Endeavour to discover the seething southern seas, and we imagined pacific islands and laying ourselves in the sheets of white silicone beaches and basking there under swaying palm trees, sated temporarily, hand in hand, side by side.
And we ate kippers. Oily smoky kippers, dripping with butter. We argued about whether they’re better with white or brown toast or bread, with ketchup or marmalade, or left unadorned except for the butter. Always the yielding, spreading soft butter.
The kippers come through the post in a sealed vacuum pack. I see the silver bronze herrings, springing from the cold North Sea to propel themselves with a high diver’s precision, through my letter box mouth. Swallowed by the hole in my front door and spat out on the hard tiled floor.
I open the package. The kippers are meant for me. There’s no note, no card, no explanation. It isn’t my birthday or any anniversary, but my name is written in bold letters above the address.
I know the kippers are a love letter, a gift of intent. Kippers say ‘mouth-watering’, ‘savouring’, ‘hunger’, and ‘taste’. Illicit desire, coded in real appetite. I smile, thinking of the taste of the sea—the taste of you—thinking I’ve unravelled the riddle parcelled in fish.
I send you a text message. ‘Kippers, mmm delicious.’
I cook the kippers for late breakfast. Smokey herring stink balloons in the house. I make a pot of tea while they sizzle on tinfoil cradles under the grill. I eat my kippers with the melted butter poured over. I add sweet red ketchup and brittle brown toast, and with every mouthful I ruminate, gestate flavours, thinking of you, my lover, who has sent them to me, who has remembered my keening desire for flavour and ever repeating taste.
Because that’s what kippers do. They come back to remind you you’ve eaten them, like they’re more important than any single meal will ever give justice to, so they repeat and repeat and repeat.
All day long, the flavour returns, a gaseous reminder, ‘Remember me?’ ‘Think of me’ ‘I’m thinking of you’ and each time I check my phone, to see if my message has been read, anticipating your coded response.
‘Disgusting’ comes the cold, unfamiliar reply and I realise then, the vengeful intent. The reply fish-slaps me icy. The fish are a message to say I—we—have been caught. Caught red-handed, smoked out and kippered, caught in a net of our own making.
Fear swills in my stomach. I’m chilled, darkly cold as the heaving North Sea. I hurl myself through the back door to the garden where I am sick. Again and again on repeat.
Author: Emily Macdonald was born in England but grew up in New Zealand. She has won and placed in several writing competitions and has work published in print anthologies and on-line journals including Fictive Dream, Reflex Fiction, Retreat West, Ellipsis Zine, Roi Fainéant, Flash Frontier, Free Flash Fiction and The Phare.
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