Dan Shields: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MEXICAN TETRA

Dan Shields
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MEXICAN TETRA

Earlier in the day, before the ambulance whisked me off school grounds, I crawled under my desk during recess, untucked my shirt, and squeezed my skin as hard as I could. I squeezed and twisted, trying to reach my organs like they could be juiced like fruits. Like they could be wrung out as sweat rags, and all the pain would flow in snarling, tarlike rivulets out of my ass, and I’d stand up straight again once everything had a chance to dry. I squeezed until my ribs turned red, tore at me, my body, the thing I’d always been told only wants to love and protect the person rattling around inside it. The bell rang and the kids returned. Flush-cheeked and sweaty, they got their science books out while howling gossip dredged from the monkey bars. I heard Cindy Glover ask where I was to nobody in particular. She peeled a scab off her knee and told everyone to make a wish.

The nurse waddles in the room, doesn’t bother turning on the light—there’s a TV hung on the wall playing reruns of Family Feud, and the flashes onscreen illuminate enough of my fragile body for her to know to frown. “Let’s get you squared away,” she says. The standard dose of morphine is ten milligrams every four hours, administered through the tube threaded in my arm. It’s a drug that sounds like a species of whale, and after D.A.R.E came in to talk about opioids, Cindy Glover latched onto it as a funny, if not unlikely, vehicle to rib the other kids in class. Your mom must have been on morphine when she had you. Bro, are you high on morphine right now? The syringe slips in and my veins crystallize like pipes shored through a frozen house. She erases “11:00 PM” from the whiteboard above my bed, writes “3:00 AM” then leaves me to ferment once more in the shadows with Steve Harvey and the smell of latex.

In a cave in Eastern Mexico, there’s a fish that swims without eyes. The kids gasped when they saw it, pointed and laughed at what looked like a translucent necktie floating in the underground lake on the projector screen. The fish had eyes once, but for all the years they did, they never saw a thing. The cave was that dark. Time eventually decided they wasted too much energy trying to use these broken parts, these eyes that wouldn’t see, so evolution pinched them. Excised of their defect, they now glide like ghosts, the mannequins of fish, guided only by vibrations and changes in water pressure.

My vitals collapse. A host of masked phantoms burst into my room and shove me onto a gurney. They rush me around sharp corners and through long, veiled hallways. They hover with the crooked necks of vultures. They finger my IV bag and flip through my medical records on a clipboard as I arrive in a beeping room with more masked people, igniting high-pitched instruments designed to gouge through membranes and myelin. I begin to cry, no more out of fear or pain or sorrow than it is a signaling that I can. So they know not to take what still works. It reminds me, as the walls fuse with the lights, of how I had just hit the floor when Cindy Glover raised her hand during the video, saw I wasn’t there when she looked back, but still asked if the fish ever knew they even had eyes, and if the cave became a different kind of dark when they finally lost them for good.

Dan Shields is from Middletown, Pennsylvania, home of the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown of 1979. In former lives, he was a college athlete, library aide, meal prep worker, Bed Bath and Beyond customer service representative, and 2015 Atlantic City Beach Olympics push-up champion. Dan Shields now lives in Washington, DC, reminiscing about most of it. He’s new in the nest at @DanDotShields.