Where the eels went
by Alex King
08/04/2020 | fiction | 15 min read | TW: suicidal ideation, death
Illustration by Sophia Bharmal
Sometimes the woman forgets that she lives alone now. When she woke in the darkness before alarms or heating she stayed in silence as though trying not to wake another person. Lay on her back and watched the room. The dark of the world settled on the lumpen dark of drawers and bedposts. The cat rolled over next to her, turning up a fluffed underbelly, sighing contentedly in his sleep. She hooked a crust of sleep from her eye and lay for a long time listening to the stirrings of water in the pipes. The mice in the crawlspace. The ice and the ivy in the walls. Come on. Shower and dress every morning. A deal is a deal.
She showered. Hot water. Cracked tiles. Mildew forming on the walls but at least she’s awake. Making do, keeping going, just like we said. She made coffee. Fed the cat. Spilt the coffee. Cleaned up the coffee. Realised that she didn’t have any milk and sat eating dry cornflakes in the dark kitchen with her eyes adjusting and her hair styled by the comb’s missing teeth. The spoon clanked into her mouth as the earth rotated to the precise angle that set the morning sun free of the garden hedge. The spreading light pooled out across the garden. Along the kitchen floor and up the wall. The custard kitchen tiles and stainless-steel light fittings glowed as though set in amber. She looked up and caught the spice rack wink. She was twenty-six years old. Her wife was dead. Dirty dishes piled up in the sink.
-----
She’d stopped answering the phone. For a while, the calls had been from old friends that hadn’t known. Calling up just to check how things were, thought maybe they could get a coffee and catch up. She’d liked that. Just that first moment. Their happy tone, their half-familiar voice. Now the calls came from strangers. Offered renewals to neglected subscriptions. Potential clients rerouted from the website that she didn’t know how to shut down. Insurance scams and PPI. Still, she got a quick kick out of it, just briefly. There was a guilty joy in speaking, even for just one moment, with a person whose records indicated, in black and white, that at this number and at this address her wife was alive, well, and possibly interested in double glazing.
Then came dread. Breaking the news. She told them no no she banged her head forever and ever. I know you’re sorry. I know you didn’t know. Why am I consoling you when my wife is the one who’s dead.
I don’t care. I just don’t care. What can I do with your sorry, with all your sense of feeling? Can I gather it, shape it, take all the grief and all this love and breathe my wife back to life? No. I’d have done it already. And if you were so bloody close, why has it taken you six months to call?
The calls were fewer now. Barely once every few weeks. Some day she would answer the last one and then there would be no more. She would be led by phone lines to correct each ridiculous resurgence of life until there was no filing cabinet, phone directory or scrap of paper that claimed her wife’s continued existence. I am sorry. I love you. I am snuffing you out.
-----
If she killed herself, who’d look after the cat? Exactly, so don’t kill yourself. Simple logic, but somehow it had held up so far. It helped that she didn’t think they’d be reunited on the other side. They’d had their time, finished. Death was blunter for her than it had been for her parents. In Dad’s head there was soft music and raven feathers and when he’d started to go the fear of coming dark had been tempered with mystery. Her own view of death had no enigma or tinsel. Complete cut off. Zero-calorie. Flat-chested.
-----
The cat came into the kitchen, all oil and milk. She was sat on the floor trying to fix a cupboard drawer and making a complete hash of it. The cat was a proper git and her closest friend. Her only friend, really. He was older now and his forays from the cat flap were short and comical. She’d watch from the window as he walked out before turning back instantly at the slightest hint of rain or the sound of a distant car. They made a good pair. What have you got there boy? she said. The cat padded closer. Eyes wide. Leaned forwards. Opened his mouth. And there, suddenly, in her hands, was the little body of a dying shrew.
Oh Mog, she said. Why’d you go and do that?
It was his first kill in years and in winter too. Must have caught it in the fields as it moved from torpor. She took the shrew gently into her hands. Its tiny legs were folded up to its chest like a beetle. Eyes still closed and breathing with epileptic lightness. A bad way to die. Without thinking what she was doing she was out of the back door and walking away from the house. Past the yew tree and the weeds. Crossed the road, through the kissing gate and into the fields without questioning where her legs were taking her. It wasn’t until she was past the old grain silo and the greyhound sheds that she realised she was walking to the monkswood.
No-one came to the monkswood anymore, which was why her wife had liked it. Centuries ago it had been planted with oak trees to be used in the ceiling of the cathedral twenty miles away. But now it was overgrown and entirely forgotten and only its name hinted at its origins. Her wife had told her that. She always knew those sorts of things. She stopped at the wood’s edge where a stream ran into its border. As good a place as any for a shrew funeral. She kneeled next to an old elm tree at the edge of the beck, cushioning the shrew in a hollow at its base.
The shrew had stopped moving. Its rib cage was still. Its throat had stopped twitching. At peace, or at least no longer suffering. Such a small thing. So little blood.
The woman leaned back and sat on the heels of her boots. Looked into the wood. Beyond the chestnuts to where the brook ran deep through early patches of forget-me-not and cowslip. Beneath the surface darted the long inky splashes of minnow shoals and sticklebacks. Once there were eels. Under the cool dark rocks they coiled fluid and lissom. With scaleless skin they passed without ripple through cold and brackish waters so that the little fish would scatter before them. They moved without fear and their alien grace was as liquid and without form as the element through which they swam. Where they passed their presence was marked by oil patterns in the sediment bed and each morning you could find their teeth studded into the river clay in subtle formations like some unknown language of soil and bone. In the dappled sunlight beneath the gentle canopies they hunted and swam and played out their lives beyond the sight of human eyes.
This was her place really. Where her wife would perch in the crook of a tree and invent stories, or sing made up songs, or point excitedly at plants and tell her their names. Or she would just sit by the waters edge reading with her feet dangling in. She was like the eels in that way. No fear. She was like the eels in lots of ways and seemed to have a special kinship with them. She treated them like dogs or even friends. They came to her when she sat and she would feed them or play with them, running her hand over their snouts or stroking the oily softness of their bellies. They won’t bite me, she’d laugh, and if they do, I’ll just bite them back to show them who’s boss. She used to lean close to the shimmering surface of the water and whisper to them. Spoke to them in dead languages, or morse code or imitated the sound of bird song. She gave them names, and claimed that she could recognise them. Claimed that she answered when she called. One late night after too many whiskeys she’d murmured, voice a little slurred, that sometimes they spoke back.
Eels haven’t changed since the cretaceous period, she’d said. They’ve been the way they are since before people or shrews or birds or plants.
Plants? Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it. Well, flowering plants at least. Is this another one of your funny lies? I’m not falling for this, not after the ice cream van incident. It’s true. Cross my heart.
Go on then.
Go on what?
You can’t just say cross my heart. You have to actually do it.
Alright then.
and she had. Bless her, she actually had.
Alright, the woman had said to her wife, I believe you. She remembered looking at the nettles growing along the riverbank, remembered noticing how their white flowers grew around their stems in delicate ruffs. Hard to imagine that there were eels in this stream before there were nettles.
and her wife had looked at her in that curious way she had, head slightly to one side, eyes shining and unreadable.
They’re older than the stream.
But the farmers had drained the stream for water to grow rapeseed and wheat. It wasn’t legal and the locals had petitioned but the council were useless, which the farmers knew. So they damned the stream and grew the crops and the water level got lower and lower until it was too shallow for eels and then one summer the eels were gone and her wife went with them.
When her wife was only just dead and the crust of her grief had barely begun to form she’d come to this spot. With the eels gone the little fish teemed unhunted and bred in numbers that the river could not support. When summer came and the water ceased to flow they were trapped in shrinking pools, pebbles pushing through the surface. The puddles were so thick with fish you could scoop them out in your hands. Some dried right down, evaporated entirely, and the rocks were strewn with static silver forms. Stickelbacks and minnows. Glassy eyed and baked by the sun.
She’d look at the dead fish and the dried up river and that same night the woman had taken a shovel and an axe and a pair of wire-cutters and she’d travelled a mile upstream in waders in the dark until she found the dam. The farmers had dug two trenches across the width of the stream and filled them with logs, packed in dirt and rocks, anchored by wire mesh and steel reinforcing rods. Irrigation trenches ran off from the blockage, spreading the stolen water over the farmland while a pathetic trickle continued downriver. She’d stood for a while looking at the construction of it, wondering what machinery they’d used and how many men it took and whether they’d thought about the impact their actions would have. She thought about fragility and how easy it is to cause harm and how hard it is to repair it. Then she’d thought about her wife. About the last minute of her life. About the light in her eyes as she smiled and how that light had gone out.
And then she smashed the dam to pieces.
She cut through wire, hacked at logs, shovelled soil and dirt and rocks until her muscles ached and her hands were bleeding and cracked and there was soil deep in her grooves, in her joints, in her mouth and in her eyes and still she’d kept going in blind fury with axe and cutters and tearing with her bare hands until like the swollen belly of some monstrous creature the dam had burst and water had rushed out in great muddy torrents tearing parts of the dam with it and still she hadn’t stopped but kept hacking, sawing, biting until every last bit of the hateful edifice was broken, shattered, ruined, never to return. Then she’d stood in the river soaking and spattered with mud and started to cry. She’d cried for her wife and for the eels and for the cruelty and pain of the world and it had come in terrifying chest-wracking sobs that made her whole body spasm with the grief of it. She asked how do I go on and why not me instead and I don’t know how to be here without you.
I don’t know how to be here without you.
They’d never rebuilt the dam. Though the water returned and the stream flowed once again there were no more eels. Though she looked for them often they did not return. Lately she had come to the monkswood less and less. The eels are gone. My wife is gone. Water will not flow backwards.
The woman shook her head. Funny how it creeps up on you. Strange thing, grief. Makes you do all sorts of things you’d never do otherwise. Cause criminal damage to property and pray to god and walk two miles to bury a shrew. She looked down at it, its little body hunched in the hollow. She gathered leaf mulch in both hands. To keep away the rats and crows and foxes she convinced herself but mainly it just seemed fitting. She decided not to say a prayer because, after all, it is only a shrew. She just nodded, once, as if wishing it good luck. Then she sprinkled dirt on its corpse in silence and tried to stop thinking about eels.and then the shrew moved. Twitched. Flinched under the falling dirt. Flipped onto its front in one quick motion and started to run, darting into the wood faster and faster as though no cat or man had ever touched it. Its legs moved in a blur carrying it through the undergrowth and it was gone.
The woman stayed on her knees with mulch falling from her hands. Brushed them together. Looked up at the sky and then over to the river. Was that you love? Would be just your sense of humour.
-----
She renewed her wife’s subscription to the local paper and Gardener’s World. Signed her email up for spam. She tells people that she’s doing okay and that she’s just about getting along and that her wife turned into an eel. The cold callers still ring sometimes. She says that her wife’s on the loo, or out in the garden, and that if they ring back later then they might catch her. She isn’t worried that she’s lost it or at least not entirely. It isn’t that kind of haunting. Her wife doesn’t appear in shining light, or bang pots and pans about in the attic. She doesn’t sit up late into the night and drink whiskey with her ghost. But she feels that the kettle boils a little faster, as it would do only for her.
It’s a poor resurrection, but it’ll do.
-----
With the sun going down the woman sat by the window watching the light fade. The cat came in. Scratched the arm of the sofa and balled up in her lap. She leaned her head back. Listened to the rain starting on the paving of the drive. Falling in fattening droplets. In potholes on the road. Over the fields and the granaries out to the dark shadow of the wood. Sousing the elm trees. Wetting the shrews. Soaking into the river and swallowed greedily down to its depths. In the shadows of the riverbed the teeth of eels lie in silence. The cold-water washes over them. Licks them white and clean and sharp. Rolls them around the rivermouth before tucking them back into the soft clay of its gums. They are not washed downstream but remain here for so long as there is a river to hold them. Time will pass. The world will change. They do not return. But in all the waters of the monkswood there stirs the memory of eels.
about Alex (he/him)
A wooden puppet brought to life by a child’s wish, Alex longs to return to the unfeeling wood of his original form. He can usually be found in Oxford, where he enjoys practicing writing, long late-night runs, and staring into the abyss.
Recently, the abyss began to look back. They made eye contact. There was a moment. Alex has now been on three dates with the abyss and thinks that things are going rather well.
Alex doesn’t use social media, so if you would like to contact him, please speak to the crows. They know how to find him.