Catch and Release
Jessica Bakar
My first pet was a goldfish from Walmart. When I wandered across the pet aisle linoleum, staggering sheepishly behind my mom, I let her do the talking, pointing, and swiping until I held a copper life enclosed in plastic. In the parking lot, I decided she was a girl and named her Belle.
Belle didn’t last a week. I was the one who found her. Capsized, tail sagging—her body, a comma rounding the perpetually unfinished sentence of this punctuated life. I knew then, circling the bowl in shock, it was my fault. Two days of my forgetting, and she starved to death.
*
I dated someone for exactly a year and told no one about it. But if I did, if I said anything at all, I would tell them about last summer at Walden.
Last summer, when she peeled off toward the pond because I’d asked if it was really there. Last summer, when she parked the car because I’d read the writing of a dead man she’d never heard of. Last summer, when we wandered off the path, past families and floaties, toward the edge of the water and sat for a moment so full I held it in my palms.
I would talk about the minnows, how we tried to count fish until we sank beside each other, watching silver bodies catching light. Their eyes, glass beads sewn into fish heads, so unflinching I lost a staring contest with the smallest. How they darted, directionless, while the pond swirled bronze, and we laughed, losing sight of them all. And when she rose, dusting herself off slowly, she stood quietly behind me in clipped shade, watching me watch my fish.
I would tell them that when she asked, after an eternity, wanna keep going? I didn’t. I wanted her to leave me, for a second longer, in this moment wide enough to hold us both. Wide enough for all the fish in the world.
*
Every July, when the sun seared tans deep into our being, my family would pile into the minivan, jigsawing sleeping bags and swimsuits, fishing poles and fire starters, and drive three hours north. In Tahoe, we would fish at an artificial pond, stocked seasonally, that my dad discovered on the internet.
I only ever caught one fish. A small rainbow trout I gutted myself. When I felt that familiar tug again, years later, a second fish and I tussled for the breadth of a moment—a moment that when stepped inside unfurled farther than the pond—my feet planted solidly on land, the fish pleading until the screaming reel was all I knew. As I dragged the floundering fight to shallow water, I could see the trout glisten in its writhing, ascending momentarily at my pole’s command.
When the scrawny pole snapped in half, my potential catch suspended mid-air, the fish escaped, baited hook still plunged in its mouth.
*
In 1984, the Monterey Bay Aquarium made its first attempt to display a great white shark. The display ended after eleven days when the shark died because it refused to eat.
*
Last summer, when I learned there is more than one way to starve. When my hands held her hip bones, and I knew how she had shed herself, without meaning to, before she disclosed the number on the scale. Last summer, when we slept through thunderstorms and afternoons, holding each other instead of eating. When she asked one night, her face pressed into my collarbone, and I told her what I hated about my body as if that knowledge alone could sustain her. And when she pulled my head to her chest and whispered through me, I love your thighs. I love your stomach. I love your arms. I love your face, I needed to drown my ears beneath my hands to make it stop, knowing none of this would matter.
*
In the 90s, after the first shark starved itself to death, the Monterey Bay Aquarium launched Program White Shark. That initiative led to the construction of a 1.2 million gallon open sea exhibit, which displayed six sharks between 2004 and 2011. During that time, the aquarium set the record for the longest a great white has been held in captivity. 198 days. Six months. A young female.
*
My friends and I were in Monterey when one asked if I was going to break up with my girlfriend. It was winter, and we had spent the day speeding down Highway 101, the wind ripping into us through rolled windows. In the morning, we would wade through early fog and into the marine museum, beholding bonito and bluefins, schools of sardines, the hammerhead circling the same tank once occupied by great whites—but for now, we spent the night outside our rented yurt. We hadn’t seen each other in months, and as we huddled around the firepit, we rehashed everything about the fading fall.
What kind of question is that? You don’t just randomly ask someone if they’re gonna break up. I stared across the fire, disbelief seeping from my open mouth. We watched the warmth of our words materialize then disappear as pale vapor against the night. We stayed like that, staring silently across the fire until my friend understood I had nothing more to say.
Okay, dude—whatever, I’m sorry. I’ve just never seen you this fucking depressed.
He didn’t know the circumstances of my relapse. He didn’t need to ask. Things had not been good for a while, but I couldn’t see that yet.
*
When Program White Shark ended, the aquarium stopped trying to keep great whites. Those sharks required too much. It was unsustainable to force nomadic creatures, giant wanderers meant to swim out and away, behind glass.
*
Last summer, when I lay in her childhood bed holding the tender rain in my mouth, and she floated her fingers across my hip, tracing its stream of stretch marks, and I watched her watching me, thinking maybe, just maybe, we could go on like this forever.
*
Once caught and intended to keep, there are steps to minimize a trout’s suffering. The fish should be thwacked swiftly between the eyes. Rendered unconscious, its thrashing body subdued, immediately after, the hook is removed. There are tools manufactured for this purpose, but a rock or stick should suffice. The best way to keep a fish and let it go.
My dad never taught me this mercy. Instead, we would loop our catches to a stringer, elongating their pain as they floated at the pond’s edge, flopping in eclipsed consciousness hours after we’d first shelled them from the water.
*
I don’t know if she had ever been fishing. I doubt it since she disliked seafood, yet it was as if she’d moved through this moment before. As if she’d dangled a thousand fish at this crossroad, contemplating their lives as they beat themselves against air. Kill the thing, or let it go.
It was natural—the parting of her tidal lips as they unspooled the words, so softly, so swiftly, without tears.
I have to let you go now—
I nodded, tore the hook from my mouth, and thrashed toward life.
Jessica Bakar (she/her) is from Northern California and lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, where she studies English and creative writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Geist and The Maine Review, among others. You can find her on the internet at jessicabakar.carrd.co.