FLEX — MARIA POULATHA
/Content Warning: Animal Cruelty
Teddy pulled a conger eel out of the sea and hung it from a tree branch. We watched it whip the air as if a current danced through it, stupidly searching for a path to the ground. By morning it swung in the breeze like wet pants. A small crowd had gathered round and my aunt had to take to her bed for a whole week at the sight of it. Teddy and his friends peeled off their soaked shirts and took turns squeezing their fists along the eel’s length to dissolve its spine. I didn’t think an eel had a spine but Teddy read it somewhere and they swore they heard bones cracking like ice as their shiny bodies flexed and constricted the muscle out of the surrendered thing. They pared it with kitchen knives and tugged at the skin but it tore, leaving patchy pink strips.
Alice walked by in something short and Teddy wiped his hands on his jeans and did an about-face. They kissed for the first time with their zippers tapping metallic clicks and the stench of rotting eel wafting between their eager faces. I had seen Alice first, then Jim saw her, and then Mark but she didn’t see any of us. We all got lucky that summer, grew spiky hairs on our chest and came out of our shells in sticky pools under the pier but Teddy moulted, grew glimmering and taut like something that didn’t need legs.
Teddy got his sea papers and sailed off and when years passed and he didn’t return, we pictured him ship-jumped in America, serving whiskey colas to cruel and easy women in smoky clubs.
Alice still didn’t see us. She dressed in black and chopped her daughter’s hair to the ears. I went over to hook up a washing machine and saw her from the window, splayed in a garden chair, inner thighs pink as tuna. When I turned away I saw the girl staring at me with her weird hair and I never went back there again.
The sun set, the sea turned purple. Children swatted the stinking eel like a piñata to scare away the bees. It was finally taken down after one got stung in the face and couldn’t see from his left eye. My uncle threw the eel back into the sea or buried it in the garden, no one actually remembers.
Originally from New Jersey, Maria Poulatha lives in Athens, Greece with her husband and daughter. Her stories have appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Copper Nickel, SmokeLong Quarterly (finalist for the Grand Micro contest), Flash Frog (finalist for the Blue Frog contest), Okay Donkey, trampset and others.
