Not Until Fish Fall From the Sky | Kale Choo Hanson
Nina, I won’t let you marry him until fish fall from the sky, my father says as we sit on the back deck, him on a lounge chair smoking a cigar, and Ian and I standing on the threshold of the sliding glass door. Ian shifts beside me, his ears growing pink. Let’s just go, he whispers. But I’m not ready to leave. I had known my father would say this exact thing. He said it at my cousin’s birthday party when asked to try out the bouncy house, then again at the church auction when offered a cocktail with fruit in it, and then again when my sister Ella had saved up her waitressing money to buy a used Volkswagen Bug. I won’t let you drive that thing until fish fall from the sky.
Ian is a good guy. He has a job as an accountant, keeps the philodendron in our kitchen alive, and listens to my stories like he’ll be quizzed later. It would all be fine if my father hadn’t caught him in the basement last month, polishing his piccolo. No man plays the piccolo and is proud of it, my father says to me later after a dinner of stony glares and silences. He was in marching band, he’s a great musician, I say. My father shakes his head and points at the sky. Fish, Nina. Fish.
But today, as I stand on the back deck, clutching Ian’s nimble, piccolo-trained hand in mine, watching my father puff cigar smoke from a smirk, I am ready. Well, we are ready. I snatch my phone from my pocket and send my sister a text. I hear a grunt from the other side of the house, the front driveway perhaps. I brace myself for impact.
The salmon, silvery and dead-eyed, lands on the side table beside my father. His beer, a gold cigar clipper, and ashes from a tray are launched into the air. His cigar flies from his hand as he jumps to his feet. The fish is much bigger than I had expected and I am impressed that Ella had cleared the whole house and almost landed it in his lap. What the hell? My father says as he stares down at the fish, his eyebrows narrowed and his smirk replaced with a gaping O. He doesn’t lift his gaze until we smell smoke.
We discover later that the cigar had rolled underneath the deck and into a pile of dead leaves. We get a lecture from a soot-covered firefighter. But before the red engines arrive— as we wait in the front yard watching the house erupt into flame, Ella, Ian and I with our chins tilted up in disbelief— my father is behind us, facing away from the house, feet bare at the end of the driveway, holding a 6-pound salmon in his fist, opening his mouth to say something and then closing it when nothing comes out.
About the Author:
Kale Choo Hanson is a writer and editor. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Peatsmoke Journal, Grande Dame Literary, Glassworks and Thirteen Bridges Review. She holds an MFA from Temple University and currently resides in Philadelphia.