oyster pearls and betta fish

by Courtney McDermott

 

The betta fish is missing. At first she thinks it died and her husband flushed it down the toilet. But when she asks her husband about the fish, he merely shakes his head. “Did we have a fish? I don’t remember getting one.” Then she thinks of her two-year-old, Bertie, and how he has taken to hiding things around the house. At first it was harmless: action figures between sofa cushions, dead batteries in his father’s water bottle, her gold hoop earrings in the dog’s food bowl.

Then his hiding became more precarious. Toy cars behind the radiator, burning the tips of his marshmallow fingers. He hides his mother’s time. She looks at the clock, and 15 minutes are gone, slipped into an electric socket. His father rides the exercise bike and nightmares caught between the spokes screech as the wheels spin.

But each time Bertie forgets what he’s hidden, running off to chase the dog, to climb the ottoman, leaping onto the floor. “Jump!” he yells.

She asks him about the betta fish, kneeling down so she is eye-level with him.

“Uh oh. Where go?” Bertie asks, his eyes wide and white like oyster pearls. Yes, his mother thinks, he’s like an oyster trapping treasure.

She checks all of Bertie’s usual hiding places: the crack between the bed and the wall, the toilet, the trashcan, his father’s shoes. When Bertie’s mother leans down to wipe snot from his nose, she sees a flicker of blue in his ear. She claps his face between her hands, holding him still.

Sure enough, a fin wiggles out of his ear.

She drags him into the emergency room. “There’s a fish in his ear!”

Other mothers in the waiting room overhear, their children with scrapes, allergic reactions, broken toes. They raise their eyebrows at each other. She shields Bertie’s ear from them with her body.

The doctor frowns, but this is her resting face. “Yes, it’s a betta,” she says.

“Of course it is. I told you that.”

“We’ll get it out in no time.”

Bertie screams when he sees the tweezers, but in a matter of seconds, the betta is lifeless on the examination table. The nurse wipes away fish scales and ear wax.

“I see something else,” the doctor says, looking into his ear again.

They drain Bertie’s ears next, and something falls out that she doesn’t recognize at first.

It’s thin and silvery and when held to the light looks like a rainbow.

“It’s mine,” the mother says automatically. Though she doesn’t recognize it, it feels familiar in her hands.

She tucks it into her purse for safekeeping. When she arrives home, Bertie races off to scatter toys about the house. His mother places the thin, silvery thing into the fish tank and watches it catch the light-filled water.

Years later, as she assembles a scrapbook for Bertie to take with him to college, she will look at an old photograph of herself holding baby Bertie in front of the fish tank. She will think she sees something thin and silvery trailing from the tips of her hair, leaking from her eyes. She knows that if she could only follow the strands it would lead her to the grotto containing everything she’s ever lost, but she will turn the page and the moment will pass.

 

Courtney McDermott (she/her) is the author of the short story collection, How They Spend Their Sundays (Whitepoint Press), which was nominated for both the PEN/Hemingway Award and The Story Prize. She is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Notre Dame. Her work has appeared in A3 Review, the Notre Dame Review, Lunch Ticket, Prism Magazine, and the Boston Globe, among others. Originally from Iowa, she lives in the greater Boston area with her husband and son.

 

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