Gutted

 You gut a fish once, with your grandfather. You are eight years old, and his hands, worn down by manual labor, envelop yours like a second skin as you isolate the catfish’s. He rambles on about how fucked up the Ozarks are because of the goddamn tourists, but you’re just trying not to imagine with every scrape of the blade that these were your insides. Your flesh being flayed.

He asks you a few times if you’re listening. You need to know this, Treena, he says, mumbling something about how your brother refuses to learn.

Be more like a boy.

That’s what he wants, at least.

He wants your hands to become rough, rough enough to graze across the fish and not feel its scales, rough enough to handle a blade and not be cut.

You make a promise to him, years later as his body is lowered into the ground, that you’ll try. I’ll try, I’ll try, you won’t cry.

And for years you do try, letting coarseness into your language and your nature, until the popular girls in middle school call you dyke, because they don’t have the vocabulary to parse your promise.

When you’re thirteen one of them sneaks up behind you in the locker room and cuts off your ponytail. She laughs—a high, cruel laugh—as you flail, a fish out of water. But then your hands still, remembering your grandfather’s sandpaper hands on yours.

The other girls are watching, smiling with all their teeth bared, wondering what the butch lesbian will do. You watch them watch you for a minute, your heartbeat amplified in your ears, and then you smile, letting their faces blur together.

Thanks, you say in a strong, clear voice. I was thinking about cutting it anyway.

And then you punch the girl who’s holding the scissors—a stupid idea in hindsight, because after the impact it’s her turn to flail, and she stabs you in the hand—but you can’t feel that pain, because all you feel is bone on bone.

It feels good. It feels like power.

Your mother makes you see two people after that: a hairdresser and a therapist. They both do their best to chip away at their assigned problems, but sometimes hair and soul are just too fucked up to fix. Or, that’s what you tell your mom after the first session with the latter—that, and that it’s not worth the money. I’m fine, you insist.

You’re not fine.

Your mom sees that, and she makes you keep going, even when you tell her that the shrink’s office smells like a sewer sprayed down with Febreeze. You don’t smell so great yourself, she says as she starts making dinner.

For weeks you refuse to talk to the therapist, Good Will Hunting-style. Unfortunately, she isn’t Robin Williams, and she keeps asking you questions every ten minutes.

How are you feeling?

What’s on your mind?

Do you feel like talking today?

And on and on, until you can’t take it anymore and you tell her: I feel gutted.

She asks you what you mean, leaning forward towards you in a way that feels too eager. You lean back.

I don’t know, just, like, gutted. You know. Like a fish?

You feel like a fish? Out of water?

She doesn’t get it, but those words feel too accurate to let them be subsumed by silence.

Not really. Just—have you ever removed a fish’s insides?

No, I can’t say that I have.

Well, it’s really weird. My grandpa taught me how.

And then you start to cry—really terrible tears, ones that don’t just seem to come from your eyes, but out of your nose and mouth until your entire face is a geyser, and all that stupid shrink can do is offer you a tissue that’s blown to bits in seconds.

But she still doesn’t understand.

He was really important to you, huh? You really miss him?

She thinks it’s that simple, so you try a different way of explaining it, between the moments when that knife tries to excavate your insides.

People at school think I’m a lesbian.

Are you?

I don’t know.

Well, sexuality’s a complicated and fluid thing, you don’t have to know now, Treena—

Don’t call me that.

Okay, I’m sorry, what would you like me to call you?

Kat.

Okay, Kat, I’m sorry. Tell me more about how you’re feeling.

I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel.

What do you mean?

I don’t know what attraction feels like; I feel gutted.

You hear it start to rain outside as she looks at you over her glasses. You aren’t sure if she sees the semi-colon; that is, if she sees the linkage between the two. You’re torn between hoping she does and hoping she doesn’t, because, either way, you’ll have to keep explaining until the truth butts up against the words and they’re joined, for once.

Tell me more about your relationship with your grandfather.

She sees it. She knows.

But you talk around it for a little, trying to create other separate spheres of truths.

You tell her about your first full memory with him, just after he has back surgery. He’s reclining in that chair of his no one else was allowed in, watching you color—you make a card for him, full of pink and purple scribbles.

Grampy, look!

He can’t really sit up, but a smile cracks his face open and he gestures for you to sit with him. As you babble on about the type of shit only a five-year-old can, he strokes your braid, running down the length of your spine.

You leave out the part about your irritation as his hands leave your hair, but stick to your spine—the way you wriggle away and he can’t stop you, that time.

You move into those moments when he holds you up, up on a bicycle, because by then your father has a new wife and a new kid and your grandmother’s dead and so he takes it upon himself to entertain you—teach you while your mom’s at work and your brother buries his nose in a book.

Grampa, you can let go now! I’ve got it!

Your legs are working in overdrive, pumping and pumping against the pedals, and you feel like you’re ready to lift up off of the pavement and fly away to the heaven where everyone tells you Grandma’s made a new home of daisies—her favorite flower, and yours, too. You want to grow them with her.

Seriously, Grampa, let go!

He eventually lets go, but not before his handprints are left on your waist, if you can even call your trunk a waist before the winnowing effect of puberty.

But puberty’s hints start early for you, when you’re about ten years old. Breast buds blossom along with the flowers you plant together, the ones you bury in dirt. You sometimes see your brother watching from the window, catch him noticing the way your grandfather tries to spray you down with the hose on particularly hot days.

But, again, you just tell your therapist about the card, learning how to ride a bike, gardening. Because, like your brother, she sees it.

They know.

She watches you closely, sees the effort it takes not to cry as you say one last memory:

He taught me how to gut a fish.