![]() They emerge from behind their fish and form a barricade around me and the woman. The fishmongers nearby roar in agreement. Grab him and we will give him a good whipping! I saw that scamp here yesterday, someone shouts. There is still time to grab a few and run away.īut the rest of the market has noticed us by now. Behind her, the whitefish wait in their pile, glistening. She recognizes what she sees in all the urchins who dare slide into the fish market, and before I can look away, she is in front of me, body heaving. My body betrays me it is as thin as a reed. ![]() She knows immediately who I am, sees the gnawing in my belly, an insistence that hollows all the things it touches. The ocean holds plenty.īut by the time I decide, the fish woman has noticed me. I would just take one or two, nothing she could not make up the next day. This money should be saved, not wasted on some limp fish. I finger the silver pieces in my pants before letting them fall back into the lining. In the time it takes for me to approach, grab the fish farthest from her, and sprint away, the woman would barely be able to rise to her feet. Hunger presses against the walls of my stomach. At her shuffling, loose fish slide down from the top of the heap to the tarp’s edge, where they remain vulnerable and unattended. Her fish are not in a net like the others, but laid out on a tarp. While the others clamor, I remain staring at the fish woman, who continues to rearrange her pile. It could all rest on the quality of shark fin. Bodies surge in the direction of the shark fin voice, knocking and grinding for the promise of a promotion, of rank advancement, of favorability. This is poetry to the house servants who came to the fish market for their masters. Real shark fin! Boost sexual potency, make skin better, increase energy for your little emperor! Another voice tumbles over that one, louder, brighter. ![]() When they flail in the air, they gleam like silver firecrackers. The ground is glossy with water from the ones that are not yet dead. Below the nets are pails to catch the water sliding off fish bodies. Around us, a dozen fishmongers do the same, their own piles of fish suspended in nets, squirming. The woman squats, her knees in her armpits, rearranging the fish so the best ones rise to the top. When I am kidnapped, I am thirteen and standing in the middle of the Zhifu fish market on Beach Road, watching a fleshy woman assemble whitefish the shape of spades into a pile. It does not happen in the middle of the night. When I am kidnapped, it does not happen in an alleyway.
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