Garbage Fish

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Lucy Zhang

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We only eat catfish heads when our parents aren’t around to lecture us. Ving Hung Supermarket sells them for less than $2 per pound, and they make a pleasant, fishy, but not stinky (so long as you add a handful of ginger), soup. Our parents call this the garbage fish because they swarm pig manure and dirt hole toilets stuffed with urine-soaked toilet paper. Catfish hide in the dark because their dirtiness is too much to reveal under the light, our parents say. But if you must buy it because we’ve failed you and you’ve failed yourselves, make sure the surface mucus is clear as glass and that the fish comes from those cornfed farms Americans love to make documentaries about.

It takes a certain amount of tenacity for this garbage fish to survive in sewers and pits—a quality of the catfish that I admire and Partner-In-Living-And-Licensed-Relationship hasn’t bothered to research. Partner-In-Living-And-Licensed-Relationship goes along with buying catfish because all the other options at the grocery store trigger severe decision fatigue and I’m the primary one who cooks. As long as I cook out the funk, I could feed Partner-In-Living And-Licensed-Relationship poison, and nobody would know any better.

We were a match made relationship. While visiting my grandparents, my mother came across Partner’s profile written on a sheet of paper clipped to the back of a paper parasol: two pages of details on Partner’s education—every test grade from high school to college, financial background—no debt, one car, one apartment, career projection with a job lined up at some big institution in the United States. My mother hit it off with Partner’s mother and shared a doctored document on my accomplishments: I was still under twenty-five, had a gentle temperament, and was quick with my head and hands. I don’t know where she got the “gentle temperament.” Maybe from the time I nursed my mother during her bout with breast cancer because my father was too much of an emotional dunce to understand her needs. That wasn’t a demonstration of gentleness though; it was an act of survival. My father earned a salary, but my mother earned a salary and covered all my school tuition from her personal bank account. In any case, my mother and mother-in-law sealed the deal within the year, after which my mother flew home with a marriage certificate and Partner in tow.

Partner-In-Living-And-Licensed-Relationship and I have a working relationship. The good thing is our core values align: we want to survive and live in comfort. I don’t ask for much more than that. Partner sleeps in the guest room while I sleep in the master bedroom. We tried sleeping together, but our schedules meant waking Partner up too early, or keeping me up too late, and we prefer the extra individual bed real estate. We agreed to live separately once we’d collectively earned ten million dollars, a moment I anticipate as though it were the final droplets of melted ice water pooling at the bottom of my mug. I’ve written out my plans in a notepad: find a good woman (I’d given up on men) who can teach me to have sex so that my mind stops concentrating on the tick of my watch, couch surf from Ecuador to Vietnam, and settle down near my sister who promised me unlimited bowls of pho so long as I babysat her chinchillas in case coyotes snatched them up.

We dedicate at least one meal together on the weekends, and on the weekdays, I deliver dinner to Partner’s office and have my one meal a day separately late at night to minimize bathroom trips during work hours. We eat catfish head soup after we’ve run out of other meats and must resort to excavating ingredients from the depths of our freezer. Fish head soup requires that both of us eat together in the kitchen where we can easily spit eyeballs onto the table after slurping off the fatty cheeks. A messy endeavor. I’d rather eat alone.

However, lately, Partner insists on buying more and more catfish heads, filling the entire lower compartment of the freezer. I can no longer fit my thin tray of concentrated black tea ice cubes that I like to suck in spite of my mother who forbade me from drinking chilled drinks as a child. Partner shrugs when I bring this up and suggests that we cook another fish head soup. A garbage soup, I correct. I remind Partner that eating so many catfish heads together means more dishes to wash, more surfaces to clean, more bones to accidentally swallow.

The kitchen smells like fish and white pepper, and even though all the windows are open, I sneeze three times from the fine pepper dust in the air. Three catfish heads sizzle in our enameled cast iron pot, the bottoms brown and crisp when Partner flips them. I hover at the side and prod an eyeball from its socket with a chopstick. Partner never remembers that this stage is the easiest to extract the eyeball before the broth hides it for good.

“Again?” I ask. “We’ll really become trash at this rate. You are what you eat.”

“I thought you liked these,” Partner-In-Living-And-Licensed-Relationship says.

“Like is a strong word,” I replied. “And you forgot to remove the other eye.”

“But you like the eye. And I already defrosted another pack for tomorrow so we can have it together again.”

I jab the chopstick into the other fish head, reaching over Partner’s arm and grazing the edge of the pot. The heat burns the outer side of my pinky, but I hold my hand stable until I’ve poked the eyeball through and balanced the small orb on my chopstick. Our parents say using one chopstick is bad luck, especially when stabbing food. I walk the eyeball on the chopstick over to the garbage disposal. One is enough.

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Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Find her at https://lucyzhang.tech or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.

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