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Puberty

Story by Kat Gonso (Read author interview) June 8, 2015

Art by Ashley Inguanta

It has been three days since my fourteenth birthday, since my dad unexpectedly picked me up after track practice and told me he was taking me on what he called a mystery ride. I’d never left Cleveland, never been on a plane and, despite all that, twenty-two hours later I found myself wearing the same polka dot underwear and sharing a thin, hard cot with my dad in Croatia, the place my grandmother had always bragged about escaping—and when I ask if I can call my mother Dad says you’re on a boat and how the hell are we supposed to make a phone call. It’s a good point.

There are men on the boat. They smell like salt and sweat and my dad keeps joking with them that I am not a woman yet. I wonder how he knows the men. I watch them peer over the side of the large boat, the waves of silver tuna streaming past, unable to go far, contained by nets. The men wear orange raincoats and stand over a mound of small dead fish. Dad tells me to pick one. I point. They slip black gloves over their thick hands. They stab the fish with hooks and swing them into the water. They catch one almost immediately. Dad helps the men pull the heavy tuna from the water. It is a fighter. It brutally slams into the floor until one of the men takes out a small metal device and pounds it into its forehead and the fish stops moving and blood spreads across the deck and puddles around my shoes and streaks the faces of the men. Again, I ask if I can call my mother.

“How much you think you’ll get for this,” Dad asks the men. They tell him a number in Croatian that I know is large because he claps and says: good, good. I think the men can speak more English than they let on.

The men peel the thick skin off the fish with a sharp knife. The meat is pink and fatty and raw. Dad takes a slice between his fingers and wiggles it in front of my face.

“I’ll never eat tuna again,” I say.

“We’ll see.”

“You know I have an algebra test today.”

“Who needs algebra when you have all this,” Dad says, tossing his hands into the wind. I tell him I am supposed to go bowling with Kim after school. I tell him about biology lab tomorrow and how my teacher will fail me. She won’t take Croatia as an excuse. The men continue to capture and hit, capture and hit. The blood reminds me of the oval stain on our beige couch, the one my mother scrubbed, pretending it was red wine.

My dad says attagirl, slapping my back. There are white ridges in the flesh of the fish; they seem like they will be tough and harsh, but are not. The men place slices of the fish on their rough hands and hold them out to me, offering more. And I take it.

About the Author

Kat Gonso’s stories have been published or are forthcoming in American Literary Review, Corium, Fringe, River Styx, Crack the Spine, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Belt Magazine, and various other journals and anthologies. She was the 2013 winner of The Southeast Review‘s World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest. Her flash chapbook Where We Go When We Disappear was recently named a semi-finalist in the Black Lawrence Press Black River Chapbook Competition. She is a writing program lecturer and the writing center director at Northeastern University. She also teaches at Grub Street, a creative writing center in Boston.

About the Artist

Ashley Inguanta is a writer, art photographer, installation artist, and holistic educator. Her work has most recently appeared in Atticus Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, and the anthology The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry. Her newest chapbook of poems, The Island, The Mountain, & The Nightblooming Field honors a human connection with the natural world.

This story appeared in Issue Forty-Eight of SmokeLong Quarterly.
SmokeLong Quarterly Issue Forty-Eight
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