=Catch of the day=

To this day my mom insists that dad was not an alcoholic. But I remember coming down to breakfast and having to step carefully around him, snoring on the landing, a bottle nestled beside him like a prosthetic organ. Once I found him sitting at the kitchen table, drinking, holding up a mackerel. He was conversing with it, eye-to-eye. "You can learn a lot from a fish," he said, catching sight of me before I could slip away." He wagged an imprecise finger in my general direction. "Never forget that." I never did, though it took years of therapy to remember this incident. "He had a lot of problems," my mother says. "But drinking wasn't one of them." Why does maintaining this fiction seem to mean so much to her? 

"She's a lot farther away than you think," my father said, meaning my mother. "Don't be fooled. She exists beyond the limit of your last breath. You'll drown trying to put your ear to her lips." Is that why he had such a passion for fishing? They say that dolphins have been known to rescue drowning men. They say that's how the legends of mermaids began.

My mother kept many secrets. I've spent half my life looking for them. She hid them somewhere inside of me like Easter eggs. I'll never root them all out. The ones I don't find turn black and start to stink. That's when I finally find them.

"She's in the desert, the trackless desert, like a sphinx, where there is no water. You'll die of thirst before you ever reach her, before you can ask her anything," my father said to the fish. Was this before or after he spotted me in his peripheral vision? Was he still talking about my mother or about me? 

Some men build sailing ships inside of empty bottles.

"Like you," my father confided to the mackerel, shortly before he left for good, "I'm a fish out of water." The fish stared back glassy-eyed, it's lip torn and ragged where the hook had been yanked out.

Does a sphinx lay eggs? What kind of creature impregnates a sphinx? Or is it self-impregnating?

Over time, entire oceans have been known to dry up, leaving deserts, fossil evidence of fantastic sea creatures like x-rays left in sunbaked stone.

Sometimes, after a stroke, a person loses the ability to speak. They move their lips but no sound comes out. It may take months, even years of therapy for them to regain the words they have lost. Sometimes they never do. 

Sometimes I think that drinking must be like talking underwater.

I'll never forget the despair in my father's voice as he spoke to the fish he caught that day, a despair so deep, so desolate, and so profound that more and more of late it allows me to finally forgive him everything. 

Yes, everything and even worse than that.