Eel Bait

By Francesca McDonnell Capossela

Photo by Max Saeling via Unsplash

To get the eel bait, we had to take an old rowboat out to a motorboat. I had never gone fishing before. I have been afraid of eels ever since, at the age of seven, I saw one in an airport fish tank and learned from the accompanying sign that their blood is poisonous to humans. Even the name of the fish disgusts me, the yowl the word entails, the scream of it. 

We were staying by the beach that weekend. The doctor had said a vacation would do me good. “A little R and R,” he’d said, and my husband had repeated it down the line to my father-in-law. I hadn’t known that my father-in-law would come, or that he would suggest fishing with his friend, someone I’d never met who sold eel wholesale up in Boston. I had not known my husband would agree unequivocally, clinging to the opportunity. We had fought about it the night before. I’d wanted to know why his father was coming. “Can’t you do one thing for me?” he’d asked. 

The water where the boat was docked was foul and the air was thick with flies. They seemed to be aroused by something, circling us incessantly. I closed my mouth and, squinting, tried to breathe slowly and shallowly through my nose. I have a phobia of insects breaching the boundaries of my body, crawling up and inside me. I once found a tick on my upper, inner thigh, and I have no doubt where it was headed. Most people are worried about external damage, but internal damage is worse. Did you know that if you get thrown from a jet ski and water violently enters your vaginal or anal cavity, you can be killed upon impact? Before I met my husband, jet skiing was his idea of a good time. 

We walked to the end of the pier and lowered ourselves into a tiny green rowboat, weather-beaten and gaping like an animal carcass. My father-in-law stayed behind. Closer to the water, the bugs were worse. They collided with my lips, my nostrils, my earlobes. My husband dragged the oar through the water, first on one side and then the other, and we sloshed forwards on the black, briny water, into the density of black, lusty bugs. 

When we reached the motorboat, I remained in the rowboat while my husband stood and climbed aboard. For a moment, I felt the vessel move uneasily below me; then, it steadied. He disappeared into the hold below deck and returned a moment later holding a bucket. Climbing back into the rowboat—we swung like a pendulum in the water—he showed me the inside of the container. I squinted through the bugs and looked down at the lumps of brown-red chicken liver—the bait. I recognized the color. I looked away. 

“Can we go?” I asked. 

I felt like I was spitting flies, like they were crawling out of me instead of attempting entry. My husband picked up the oar and turned the boat around. I wondered what would happen if I grabbed the bucket and dumped the contents overboard. Would he give up the idea of fishing? Would I be free? My husband was focused on the up and down motion of the oar, glancing behind him to check our direction. I hesitated. The bucket was full of pungent liver. If it fell overboard, what would swarm up below us? Were there sharks in these waters? I imagined them circling us with hungry mouths, imagined the boat being lifted on their backs, overturned, and my limbs thrashing in the water, touching something unknown, something fatal.

Back at the dock, we found my father-in-law leaning against a fence post. He did not ask us how it had gone, launching instead into a memory I did not own, a memory shared only by him and his son. He spoke loudly as we walked back to the car, his elongated frame bent down to accommodate the disease that was warping his spine. He reminded me of one of those Gumby toys. Long, plastic limbs contorted, and the overly friendly eyes of a predator. The bugs thinned out as we got further from the water. 

On a small hill near the dock, a house sat, obscured partially by grass grown wild. My father-in-law pointed to the shuttered windows to tell me that, when he was a boy, a family had died of carbon monoxide poisoning there. Windows closed to the texture of brine and sea air had trapped the pestilence inside their home. All three of them collapsed in different rooms, unaware that a desire for privacy could be fatal. As he spoke, my breath grew short; I panted. My husband wrapped an arm around me, comforted me, captured me, led me to the backseat of the car. He buckled my seatbelt for me like he was putting a collar on a dog. 

We had been married four months earlier, a small affair of which my most prominent memory was the inhale I took before pulling on my wedding dress, the suck of air to shrink my stomach as the silk and tulle spread like a rash over my body. I held my breath as the dress climbed up me. I felt like I was still holding it now, all these months later, even though my stomach had shrunk back to normal. Even though all my clothes fit again. 

“When will we go fishing?” I asked, not following the strain of their conversation. I thought I sounded eager, not afraid. It felt like there was something long and thin and slippery in my throat. 

“Tomorrow,” my father-in-law said from the passenger seat. “We’ll get the little buggers.”

In bed that night, my husband slept soundly, his mouth partly open. It’s a myth that sleepers unwittingly swallow spiders, but I wished he would close his mouth anyway. Hated him being open like that, sprawling and cavernous for anything to penetrate. I thought of waking him, but imagined his words, Is this an attack? Should we call Dr. Thurman? I counted the mosquito bites on my ankles and wrists and sank into sleep. 

The next morning, my husband and I walked along the beach, the ground hot under my feet, the grime sliding between my toes. 

“Are you having fun?” My husband asked.

I said I was. 

“If you can’t relax on the beach,” he said, “you can’t relax anywhere.” There was the tiniest bit of blade in his voice, the slip of a boxcutter. I wondered if this was something his father had said. 

“I’m better,” I said, and I smiled the way that Dr. Thurman always smiled.   

We returned to our towels, which lay in the sand like driftwood. My husband and his father talked in loud voices, sound waves stretched out to sunbathe, showing off their figures. I saw that his father’s eyes were on me, his body sprawled and curved like a many-legged crustacean. 

“We’ll go with Mark and Bob tonight,” he was saying. “You remember Bob?” What should have been a question, a command. He moved his eyes slowly back to his son, addressing him.

“Danny’s dad?” My husband was eager to get this right.

“That’s Marvin. Bob bought you your first tricycle. You used to go bombing down the hill on that thing, gave us a heart attack.”

I imagined a child on a tricycle. The front wheel hitting a rock and jettisoning him into the air, the thud when his head hit the pavement, the blood that dripped into his eyes. A car going too fast to brake, the crunch as it crushed a small frame. The size of a casket made to fit a child.

“I think you just wanted to impress the girls,” my father-in-law was saying. “Always been a ladies’ man.” 

The bravado tickled the back of his throat and he coughed. I thought of how tired their voices must be from always shouting when they spoke. How much their Adam’s apples had to strain, like bait bobbling below the surface of the water. 

My father-in-law’s foot inched closer to me. His big toe plump as the chicken livers we had procured yesterday, the fatty organs tied and knotted with string to lure in an eel, to trick that slipperiest of creatures. I thought of the thing that had slipped out of me, one month and four days ago. The beach swam behind my eyes like a fish dipping below the surface of the ocean. I felt like I was reaching out with bare hands, trying to grasp it.  

Back at the house, I sat in bed. The sheets were thin and damp. My husband was dressing, water dripping down his back from the shower. He was preparing for the night like a soldier getting ready for war. I did not want to argue with him, and so I agreed to go. 

I was nauseous on the boat, felt I would be whipped overboard by the winds. I could not see the horizon in all the darkness, but I thought I could feel the fish circling us, closing in. I wondered what they would do to us if they were given the chance. How they would punish us. 

“Look at the stars,” my husband said. For a moment, he was behind me, his shoulder against my back. I leaned into him. Then he was gone, called by his father. He wanted to feel his own hands, feel the flesh of a fish as he robbed it from its habitat. 

I followed them to the other side of the boat. The dark water sloshed and licked its lips. I couldn’t help looking, though I didn’t want to. I no longer had the ability to protect myself, or maybe the desire. The water gurgled beneath us, black as pitch. 

We had known it was a girl. Modern medicine making us overly confident in the future. They say that in states of anxiety you are more likely to conceive a girl, the male embryo being too delicate. We had named her already, a word like a burn in the back of my mind. A word I would never think again.

One night, I called my obstetrician’s home. I had no choice; I had to talk to her. She had stopped taking my calls at the office. I had asked too many questions, had too many fears.

When she answered, I couldn’t speak at first, afraid to tell her what I’d done. 

“Hello?” she said again. I could hear something in the background. 

“I’m scared,” I’d said, my voice the grating of metal.

“Who is this?” Her voice was hushed now. On the other end of the line, she wasn’t alone.

“I did something bad,” I said. My heart was hammering in my chest. 

“Morgan?” My husband called from the other room. 

“How did you get this number?” The doctor asked. “If you have questions, you can contact my receptionist.” 

 “I drank,” I said quickly. “Last night. I had a glass of wine. Two glasses. My husband said it would be fine. This morning I––.” 

“Morgan?” My husband was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. 

I lowered my voice. I didn’t want to tell her, but I had to. Someone had to know. “This morning I could feel it, in my stomach.”  

“I’m going to hang up,” the doctor said, but she hesitated for a moment. “You can contact my receptionist in the morning. Any questions you have can go through her.” Another noise on her end. A child’s voice.

“Do you have a girl?” I asked. 

“Excuse me?” 

“I can hear her, in the background. What’s her name?” 

“Don’t call this number again,” she said. The line went dead. 

I stood there, a hand on my stomach, my husband watching me. Later, they would tell me that it wasn’t the wine. That there was nothing I could have done. But, of course, I never believed them. 

There were shouts from the men; my husband had caught something. I squinted down at the water where the snake-like creature thrashed, its mouth open and hooked. Blood seeped into the slate of the ocean; I thought I could smell it. My husband’s strong arms wrestled the animal, lifted it from the waves. Suspended, it throbbed midair, heavy and desperate, pulling on him. Trying, with everything it had, to stay alive. 

For a moment, it was unclear who would win. Whether man would drown in water or fish drown in air. Then, the eel landed on the floor of the boat, fighting the element. A twisted slimy thing, like an intestine. I remembered the airport sign, remembered that its blood was lethal, toxic enough to cramp your heart and kill you. 

Around my husband, the men were cheering, hollering, the sounds deep and animal. They clapped his back, threw arms around his shoulders. He bent to pick up the creature and brandished it over his head in victory. Its eyes were wild on either side of its head, watching, watching. Wanting to know its own death. And I watched too, wanting to know. Wanting, this time, to be sure.  


About the author:

Francesca McDonnell Capossela grew up in New York City and holds a  Master’s from Trinity College Dublin. Her work has been published by Hanging Loose Magazine, Banshee, The Cormorant Broadsheet, Dark Matter (forthcoming), Guesthouse (forthcoming), and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She co-hosts the poetry podcast Sharpen Your Tongue. Francesca recently completed her first novel and lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Garielle Lutz selected “Eel Bait” as the winner of the 2022 Columbia Journal spring contest in the fiction category. Learn more.