My Finest Sheephead, Stephen Elliot

Afternoon limps away like a grocery clerk who shit his slacks. I head to the wharf. The neighbor’s son lent me his secondhand pole; the marina pours shrimp in a plastic bucket. I take the pole and bucket to where the ocean turns black, feathering municipal pilings with strands of chartreuse weed. It takes weeks to develop a pattern: Shrimp fastened to hooks, shrimp lowered to sheephead, sheephead fastened to shrimp, sheepehead removed from ocean, sheephead stacked in happy red sheephead piles, etc. Though in minutes, a genuinely ugly woman from Modesto, her retarded son and dog likely erase any achievement. Without warning, she grabs my finest sheephead and begins speaking abrasively about similarities between human and sheephead teeth. Not to be outdone, the son and dog position their faces close enough to the sheephead to precipitate an uncomfortable, multi-species stare down. When one sheephead involuntarily flares its gills, son and dog begin screaming and barking down the wharf in what appears a scripted conniption fit. The woman looks at me like a pedophile, throws my finest sheephead into the ocean, then asks what I did to her child? I tell her it was the sheephead, not me, to which she responds, “There’s something very wrong with you.” I turn away to watch the paper-white belly of my finest sheephead disappearing into black ocean … thunderheads erecting mountains above the horizon … a trawler flanked by seabirds … hummocked swell … until I can’t see another thing.

Stephen Elliot is a writer from the Bay.