Yep. 

It’s not worth trying for. But if you don’t it just sits there. 

Before we moved up to the foothills, I fished off trawlers in the San Francisco Bay. Slow months of rockfish and salmon. Then a week in early spring brought an apocalypse of herring. The low tide  white with sperm. Rocks and piers clotted with gleaming yellow pearls. The roe was gold, that’s it, all you had to do was keep a net out and herring would catch in masses, all you had to do was slit their bellies and the sac would gush, all you had to do was sift the mushed pink skin curd back and forth over the sieve until from it fell tiny endless shining gold. 

I retired when the work hurt my body. Thirty years. After that I fished off Baker Beach under the Golden Gate, catching herring in the fog where the country ended. But I never caught enough to sell and my wife hated bleeding money in the city where it was 45 degrees in June. Her father died in this house and her mother was already dead so we moved in. 

I like it here. There’s a path that dips between the pine trees from our house to the river a few yards down. I could skip a stone across the water from our kitchen window if it weren’t for the trees. When the night lifts I walk down with a rod and icebox in the splitting cold. 

Besides that perfect week in San Francisco I rarely caught much more than what we ate. But here it’s herring chowder every day and we still have a whole freezer of them, at least thirty. They stick into one cold mutant herring, torn fins and tails hanging off all sides and gaping teethy jaws cracked back and gorged black alien pinhole eyes all over. One bulging dead machine of herring. Silver as an oil slick. In San Francisco my wife worried whether eating pollution every day was killing us. 

She likes it here. She says they panned more from this river in the first year of the gold rush than the next ten. A billion dollars. That’d be nice. There’s still gold but not billions. But who needs that. Her dad told me once when she was growing up she’d pan with the neighbor boy every day of every summer until she moved down for college, then that first hot day alone in the river he sifted a few bright slabs and turned them in for thirty five thousand dollars. That’d be nice too. 

Fishing here is different from the sea. You don’t just throw your line and wait until it tugs. You prospect like you do for gold. If you want herring, you walk along until the bank gets soft and wade into the cool low ribbons flowing off the edges before May, when the fish leave for the lakes. If it’s a rainy year it’s good because the river swells. If it’s a dry year it’s good because it’s easier to hunt in low water. Sunglint on a gray fin gliding in clear water. Wait for where mosquito clouds lift off the trailing ripple in black fright and aim your line ahead. No one taught me that. All you have to do is look.

A girl and a boy were in the house across the road. They panned the river while I fished. The older one, the girl, carried a sieve in a broad steel pan that clanged when she walked. They would walk past me around the bend. I would hear their quick legs slosh, splash, slosh into the middle of the river where the bed is black and nearly fine as sand. I would hear them crouch so low the water lapped their necks. I would hear that pan drag back and forth, scraping and rattling and scraping again.

The boy might have been older but he was shorter and his face was set like he didn’t know what to do and was waiting for someone to tell him. The only sound he ever made was MINE MINE MINE when he didn’t get his way. Say, when he wanted the pan. Or when he dredged up black. Or when his sister saw something shiny. Sometimes she looked so violent walking back home with him it was hard not to laugh. 

As they got used to me they’d pan closer to where I stood with my line just off the path in rustling pine shade. Once they got so close I could have fished them, but I was busy. I was busy catching the biggest herring I ever saw, teasing the weight gently back and forth. A high whining MINE MINE MINE cut the air and God did that fish bolt. I started yelling at them to go far the hell away. The girl stopped glaring at her brother and looked at me from the river like she was trying not to cry. She took his arm and they dredged through that water, knees sloshing, around the bend, then the most quiet minute I’ve ever lived.

Then a tug and I swear I didn’t know a fish could be so easy. The line pulled across the river. I reeled it back without a hitch. I did that three times, closer with less give each time, then I reeled up a brilliant gray herring big as my thigh, with plum-blue scales gleaming down its back. Supple, supple. I slipped the hook from its lip. I pressed two fingers in each gill and pushed its neck against my knee until it cracked. The flapping panicked meat of it relaxed and died. I put it in the icebox.

Then I remembered my wife. She had a bad cold. She blamed me. I left the fridge open cooking chowder last night and forgot about it until breakfast. The house is freezing, she said. I said it always is. But when I left that morning she was wheezing so I promised I’d come back to check on her soon. I pushed my rod deep in the sand and started up the path. I had a rush of dread coming home but she was asleep in bed, my sweet cold wife. I took a pot of chowder from the fridge and boiled it on the stove and left it covered for her.

When I came back down I saw them ahead where I had been fishing. They were hunched over my icebox. The shuddering pine threw coins of sunlight on them. The girl was halving my fish with a pen knife, hacking up and down the gut and in and out the spine and through the face. He watched, sulking. This was a compromise. She dug the guts out, dragging her palms against the sides. It was like a funny cartoon on the sand, big pink noodles and orange puke and somewhere the heart a fluttering red stone. Holes for eyes. Then she flung mounds and mounds of gritty blond dung caviar on the sand. 

She stopped. 

She held a gold knot. I mean gold. Ugly with holes eaten through, but clean gold. She looked at it. He looked at it vaguely then his eyes fixed hard. He wailed MINE MINE MINE. She nudged him to stop. He fumbled for the fish with both hands. Then she grabbed it and there they were, two kids yanking half a herring back and forth. 

She yanked and he stumbled past her, lost his grip, fell screeching in the water. He heaved off the bed and threw two wet clumsy fists on hers. She jerked the fish against him. He toppled back. Splashed solid like a dead thing. His head broke on the bedrock. She watched his body rise and dip. 

When she stirred to turn around I hid from her. She was a girl. I hid behind a stand of pine trees off the path. She trudged past me. When she was out of sight I walked down. Belly-up in the calm river. The face shook softly back and forth underwater, no thank you, no, no. Something black and half-solid crept out the mouth. The eyes were shocked. An arm bobbed light above him. A hand crested the water, trailing back and forth.

Of course I called the cops. Probably before her parents knew. But I didn’t tell my wife. From the way she moaned in bed she had a fever. She slept all day while I was in the kitchen. I hacked the block of herring from the freezer. I dropped it in the sink and hacked the fish apart. I hacked each one up and down the gut and in and out the spine and through the face, trying, trying.

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Selen Ozturk is a San Francisco-based writer born in Istanbul. Her writing appears or will soon in Evergreen Review, Hobart, Ghost City Review, Bayou Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, and SFGATE. She has received support from Bread Loaf, Grub Street, and The Writers Grotto. She holds a philosophy degree from UC Berkeley and works as a journalist.