Bergita Bugarija
Gills
Raven slogs down the steps from the apartment above her family’s commercial linen press. She’s worked there since graduating high school last year because she couldn’t come up with a better idea. Midway down the staircase, she rests at the window. The beach, seagulls and ocean, subdued by the early morning light, look gray-blue. A calming palette Raven prefers to fiery daytime hues. Half a set of stairs left to descend. Her thighs rub and sweat stings where incessant friction has worn out the skin. She opens the laundry’s metal door, a flimsy work-life partition. The ironer grumbles. Chlorine bites her eyes and nostrils, glides down her throat and drives breakfast back up to her mouth. Raven doesn’t mind. She likes tasting its new state: the soggy poppy seeds and garlic of the everything bagel, the marsh of gummy bear-sprinkled cream cheese—the bears’ limbs now a decadent gooey plasma—and Gatorade, a belched echo of Yellow 5.
She swallows and walks through the whine of the presses and rollers, their screech rippling over her face and gut. The swelter of the unventilated facility settles in her hair, the strands stick whichever way like thin copper wires from her ragged phone charger cord. Dewdrops stud her boob crease, merge into rivulets, settle in her belly folds. She turns her back to a massive washer and presses her wrists and the back of her knees against its cool aluminum.
“Hey, Puffer.” Cousin Ricky’s cratered face peeks across the room behind a rainbow of drapes hanging over densely spaced crossbars. He points to his watch. She nods. Ricky gave her this job, but other than that, Raven doesn’t care for him, nor for the names he calls her. Although, Puffer is better than Hog, a moniker she mercifully parted with after school, and more apt than Raven, her absurd real name. Puffer is at least in the animal category she can relate to, though she’d prefer something a tad more majestic, like Orca. Bearing a bird name makes her feel like an impostor. She can’t fly. Instead of luxuriant plumage she has cubic footage, too abundant to spite the laws of aerodynamics. Most tellingly, she can’t sing; she doesn’t even speak.
She pushes herself off the washer, drags through the reef of driers, turns on a tablecloth press.
A fish makes sense. Aimless, speechless, untroubled. Like Mother. Sitting on the trashed kitchen floor, gaze vacant, mute. Whenever little Raven tried to cut into her stare, giggle, twirl in a tulle dress, Mother wouldn’t blink. She looked through her as though there was nothing there.
Ricky unloads a laundered column of tablecloths onto her forearms, the top of the pile leans on her nose and mouth. She turns to the side, props the pile with her cheek, gulps for air. Lately, Raven has been feeling like she can’t breathe. She wheezes, struggling to supply the vastness of her body with air.
At home she’d submerge under bath water. The peaceful crackle of soap bubbles calms her, triggering some central current like a spine, a fish bone she’d wave head to fin, if not for the tub corral.
The other day, while flipping through People magazine, she came across a shot of Katy Perry in which her hair fell in waves over her breasts, exposing only her belly button and a fin in lieu of feet. Raven curved the scissors around the Katy Perry mermaid and stuck it in the crack behind the medicine cabinet. Every day during her morning bathroom routine, she pulls out the magnificent creature by the fin, sticks it in the cabinet frame and looks at it, the mirror of her choosing.
“Hit the press, Puffer. Stick your face inside, warm it up,” Ricky says.
“Shut your garbage disposal, Dicky. Grind that grime and swallow.” Aunt Ida knows how to shush Ricky. She walks over from behind the washer, her hair frizzy, copper cuffs cutting off circulation and oxidizing her forearms like smudged tattoos. She runs the back of her hands across Raven’s hair. “Your beautiful feathers, baby bird.” She cups Raven’s tennis ball cheeks. “God couldn’t get enough of you; he stretched you far and wide. Your wings always spread, Raven.”
The washer hisses. Raven smiles. Without Ida, her days would be a ceaseless interplay of angst and dejection. Both reached a new peak last week when she stepped on the scale, a miserable weekly ritual, and nearly fell off it trying to crane her neck to see the number over the boulder of her belly.
Ida saw her dismount the scale. “Wipe that gloom off your face, bird,” she said, the ring of her voice as unrelenting as a motivational speaker’s.
Raven often feels she is the knife carving wrinkles into Ida’s face. It can’t be easy for Ida to cope with her inheritance: Ricky, the product of a failed relationship, and Raven, a souvenir from an overdosed sister. But whenever Raven’s chin quivers, Ida reprises her favorite pearl of wisdom: Raven is her lost sister’s spirit sent to nourish her soul, Ricky is a third wheel they depend on to feed their bodies.
When Ida disappears behind the washer, Raven faces its glossy steel. Her hair is the only part of her she likes. She likes how sleek it is, how different light gives it a range of shades from sable to coal to obsidian, or here in the windowless linen press silo, a sizzling tar.
She walks over to her station, a press spitting out tablecloths like giant crepes. Ricky and she gather and hang them over bars. Later she moves onto the chair covers and curtains. She steams, folds, and caresses them to smoothness. The machines hum, the textures gush over her fingers like maple syrup, transcending the tedium. She imagines the linens at weddings and parties, frills and damask in pellucid air-conditioned tents.
*
In the grocery store, a soothing clamor. Raven beelines to the seafood for Ida’s shrimp. The fishmonger hands her a brown takeout box over the glass counter. She doesn’t recognize this one. The ginger isn’t here today, the one who knows her and her order and never utters a word—just the way she likes it. This guy seems over-eager and jumpy; it makes Raven feel unsure about her ritual. She comes to the grocery store for lunch—popcorn shrimp for Ida, dick on a stick (corndog) for Ricky, meatball sub for her—but stays for the dead fish museum. For their sparkling, iridescent skin. She gazes into their frozen, glossy eyes peering up from crushed ice.
“You can’t go wrong with any of them.” The fishmonger’s voice jolts Raven. “All fresh from the bay this morning.”
She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t look up, doesn’t leave.
“How do I know? Three things.” He moves the price tag to the side and grabs a snapper. The scales make a sandpapery sound against his gloved hand. “The body should be firm.” He flails the fish left and right. Raven marvels at the taut flesh refusing to soften or give in. She feels the spine within her mirroring the movement.
“Then, clear eyes,” the monger continues. Raven watches the snapper’s limpid eye flicker.
“And the ultimate test.” He slides his latex finger as if behind the snapper’s ear. He lifts the half oval up and away from the head until it flares, like bellows. Raven gasps.
“Gills,” he says, “need to be purple, oxygenated.”
Air.
“This one lived to the gills.” He chuckles. She lifts her gaze, opens her mouth. Nothing comes out. She closes her lips, tries again. Nothing.
“Exactly,” Jumpy says.
*
After her shift, Raven goes to pick up the weekend’s used linens from the wedding tent by the water. With the air conditioning off, the tent feels like a toxic greenhouse. Sweat breaks out all over Raven. While she waits for the dirty bundles, she watches workers collapse the tables, roll the rugs, stack the chairs, pick up trash, throw leftover cake and photos into the bin next to her. She leans over it and glances at the crumpled couple, melted icing staining their fancy-wear and names inscribed in gold.
The tent manager piles dirty linens on her feet. When he doesn’t look, she snatches one photo from the top of the garbage bin, licks off the icing and slips it inside the soiled mound of textiles growing wider and taller before her until she disappears behind it.
When the manager is done, he leaves without a word. Normally, Raven prefers skipping the small talk, but this man didn’t even see her. He isn’t the only one. There was a lady that cut in front of her at the bank the other day and a girl who slammed into her side and never looked up from her phone. Never mind the why, but how? All that flesh, fat, tissue, skin; how does a heap of human matter fail to claim anyone’s field of vision?
*
At home Raven sits at the kitchen table, flipping through People magazine, crunching pretzels. The kitchen is attached to a living room where Ida sits on the couch watching her show, feet up on the coffee table, a can of Miller in one hand, a doobie in the other. The couch doubles as Ida’s bed at night. She ceded the two bedrooms to Ricky and Raven. Ricky storms in from his.
“Where’s the load?” he says.
Raven points to the front door behind her without turning around. She left the wrinkled stack at the bottom of the stairs after she fished out the newlyweds’ photo and put it in her back pocket.
Ricky opens the door. “Why did you untie it?” he puffs. “Your sloppy ass is slowing me down, Puffer.”
Raven shrugs. She knows that Ricky barks but he’s not fooling anyone. If she wanted to be mean (and if she talked) she’d jab where it stung the most. “That ammonia hair gel, Dicky? Snuggled with your peed sheets?”
Instead, Ida half turns over her shoulder.
“Beat it, Dicky.” The authority in her voice projects even when tempered by the high. When she faces back to the TV, Ricky flips her off and slams the door behind him.
Raven takes a jar of mayo out of the fridge, sticks a spoon inside, and heads to her room. She lays on the bed, pulls out the photo, and straightens it on her thigh. Her phone bounces on the comforter, glaring with apps. She taps on Facebook and types the bride’s name in the search bar. Up comes the only Leslie Chirp, her profile picture already updated with the photo resting on Raven’s leg. Raven scoops a spoonful of mayo and wipes it off with her tongue, eyes closed.
She scrolls through the ceremony pictures and slows down at the reception. Leslie and the groom playing hide and seek behind the lilac curtains Raven pressed. Gowns and tuxes protected by dainty napkins Raven folded. Flower girls dancing, twirling turquoise organza runners Raven fluffed. The cake crumbs scattered over the tablecloths she ironed, spilled wine soaking the sides, kids rolling over ikebana centerpieces, broken glass fraying the satin, guests stomping on the chair covers Raven washed, muddying the bows she steamed.
At least Mother lay speechless; these people laugh in her face.
She flings the phone across the room, it lands between a stuffed panda and a dolphin, silenced. She tries to inhale, but no breath comes in. The air to her nostrils cuts off and her hearing muffles; she is drowning in air. She needs water. She walks to the bathroom and gulps down a glass. Another. It’s not enough. She needs it everywhere, filling her.
In the medicine cabinet mirror her marbled eyeballs swim. Her skin is pale, her body limp. She shakes the cabinet. The Katy Perry mermaid falls on the tile. Raven picks it up, tears it into pieces and stuffs it in her mouth. She chews, swallows, waits. Nothing. She needs water.
She heads to the door. Ida’s passed out on the couch in the TV’s static glow. Outside, the humid air clings to her body like saran wrap. She walks into the darkness, hating her legs more with each step. They never served her; she has no use for them.
She remembers the time when Ida still laughed, when she took little Raven to the beach, and taught her how to float on the water, her wiry fingers at the small of Raven’s back.
“Just breathe,” Ida said, “look at your sisters, baby bird.” Raven looked up at the seagulls circling and screeching. She closed her eyes and felt the water support and embrace her infinite body, rendering it graceful. Raven belonged to the sea.
The burn of the raw flesh where her thighs rub against each other brings her back to the heavy, airless present.
When she reaches the beach, she sits in the surf and slides out of her jeans. She ties them around her ankles, covering her feet with the inseam. There, a fin. The water tickles her calves, salt bites her worn-out inner thighs. She takes off her shirt and pushes her body away from the shore by the palms and forearms until she is unstuck from the sand, until she floats like an inflatable mattress. Her vision clears. She can see the moon’s craters. The ocean spreads over her skin like lotion.
Her breathing spasms and she feels the need to go under, to trade bird for mermaid. She feels her legs cramp and shudder, unfurling into a fish tail. Her arms tread the water. Before her claws become fins, she stabs them behind her ears. The nails scrape and dig; useless warm goo discharges into the ocean. The air tracts open.
Gills, firm and purple, breathe.
Bergita Bugarija was born and grew up in Zagreb, Croatia and now lives in Pittsburgh. Her fiction appeared in Pleiades, Salamander, Ruminate, and elsewhere. Her story, “Gray,” is anthologized in Flash Fiction America 2023, forthcoming from W.W. Norton. She recently completed a collection of stories and is at work on a novel set in Dalmatian Hinterland.