Daniel Cohen
Another Fish
Raise your hood, and everybody’s a mechanic. My car is a Camry of a certain age, freshly washed, pretty good tires, dead battery. Passing men stop to talk, to spend a moment. Together, we stare at the engine, hands in our pockets. No one has jumper cables. I circle back to my trunk, check for the third time. Toolbox. Three quarts of motor oil. No cables.
A sound from the sidewalk, half snort, half chuckle. The Safecracker watches from a doorway, the toes of his sneakers peeking out into the sunlight. He looks like he’s leaning against the doorframe, but that’s just how he stands. Crooked. Tilted. Like one leg is shorter than the other.
The Safecracker understands the situation. He ducks around the corner, reappears at the wheel of a Honda with no hubcaps. He pulls alongside, jumps out, leaves the door open. Rummages through my tools as though they’re his own. Wrench and screwdriver. The Safecracker disconnects the battery from the Honda, carries it toward my car with two hands, like a box of peaches, and rests it next to the radiator. “Hop in,” he says.
The guy’s not a stranger to me, not exactly. He’s been around for a few months now, renting the apartment above the ten-dollar barber shop. He says he’s from here, grew up in the neighborhood, but none of us remember him. Maybe it’s just a comfortable lie he tells. Or maybe he wasn’t worth remembering.
The way the Safecracker tells it, he left us in the middle of tenth grade, when his mom broke their lease to follow a boyfriend to Indianapolis. He ran loose for a few years after high school, making his money breaking into bars around the ass-end of Lake Michigan. Did okay until the night he had a couple vodka tonics at a club in South Bend, then came back after closing to pop the safe. The bartender recognized him from the security tape. It was an election year, so the county prosecutor wasn’t in a forgiving mood, and he caught some time in prison.
Once I’m in the driver’s seat, I hunch down and watch through the gap under the hood, waiting for instructions. The Safecracker leans in, hovers over my battery, spits on one terminal, reloads, spits on the other. He lifts the battery he took from the Honda, flips it upside down, lowers it onto mine, matches terminal to terminal, steadies it. “Now.”
The Camry starts. I rev the engine because I’m afraid it’ll stall if I don’t. I leave my foot on the gas and don’t let up until I start to feel stupid.
When I get out of the car, the Safecracker is already putting the battery back in the Honda. I drop my hood.
“Thanks,” I say to his back. “I owe you one.”
“Yeah,” he says, twisting around, half-smiling. “You do.”
#
The Safecracker doesn’t wait long to cash his check. A favor owed is a diminishing asset. I’m passing Joanie’s fish market on my way to get coffee, and there he is standing outside, his face just far enough from the shop window to keep his breath from fogging it up. He’s stalking, peeking, watching through the plate glass while Joanie works. If Joanie notices him out here, she doesn’t show it.
The Safecracker is clearly smitten. Entranced. Enthralled.
I try to skirt around him, to pass at a safe distance, but the Safecracker is jumpy about people getting behind him. He turns, scans me up, down, up, and stands there. Crooked.
“You don’t look like you’re here for the fish,” I say. I smile, but I keep my lips together. Primates show their teeth to appear threatening.
“Full of mercury,” he says. “Parasitic worms. Microplastics. I’m particular what I eat.”
I try to picture the Safecracker eating. I can’t. He has that loose-jointed, hollow-cheeked look you see in heroin addicts and long-distance runners.
“Do me a favor.” He says it like he’s Aladdin rubbing a lamp.
He tells me he can’t just walk up and talk to Joanie. It’ll be easier if he’s with someone she knows. Someone local. Someone familiar. It’s like he’s a vampire in some black-and-white movie. Can’t cross the threshold unless someone who belongs inside invites him.
“Tomorrow,” the Safecracker says. “Tomorrow’s Friday. Good day for fish.”
#
Friday, there’s a crowd inside the market, but there’s always a crowd. If I got here early some morning and stood next to Joanie while she rolled up the iron shutters, I’d probably find a dozen people already there in the shop, clutching numbered tickets.
The Safecracker hasn’t shown up yet, which doesn’t surprise me. He reads that way. Distracted. Flaky. I go ahead and pull a number out of the ticket machine anyway. One hundred fifty-seven. Might worry me if I were at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, but the numbers work different here.
I look over the competition, the faces, the knowns and unknowns. I recognize the paunchy guy from the real estate office who spends his days hunched over an antique Rolodex. The old lady who walks her gray-muzzled Yorkie around the cemetery, keeping to the edges like she’s dipping her toe into a swimming pool. Others are younger, locals I went to school with, awkward teenagers grown into uneasy adults.
Not all the faces are familiar. By the window, a guy in tech-bro uniform, plaid button-down under a Patagonia vest. Next to the lobster tank, a pair of women side by side, clearly a couple, but each fully involved with her phone.
The crowd keeps shifting, taking cover behind one another, moving around just enough that I can’t be sure exactly how many people got here ahead of me. I once read about a band of polar explorers, out of food and freezing to death, who fell under the persistent illusion that there was always one more member of their party than they were able to count.
From behind me, a wash of cold air as the door opens, closes. The Safecracker has arrived. He scuttles sideways to the far wall, his shoulders hunched. Scanning the room. I look down at the floor, at the scatter of discarded tickets. I’m in no hurry for him to spot me.
“Thirty-one!” Joanie yells. Thirty-One holds up his ticket to identify himself, a somber man with heavy-lidded eyes, umbrella under his arm. It hasn’t rained since March. Maybe he knows something. The body of customers splits before him like a dividing cell, creating a passage to the counter.
Thirty-One is standing in the semicircle of open space in front of the display case. He’s big, but not as big as Joanie. Don’t get the idea that Joanie is fat, or heavy, or whatever the euphemism of the moment is. She’s fit, even athletic, with the sort of uncomplicated beauty that airlines and insurance companies are always casting into their commercials. It’s easy to see why the Safecracker, or anyone else, would be drawn to her. She just happens to be built on a scale normally reserved for power forwards and heroic statuary.
Thirty-One presses his belly against the refrigerated glass. Joanie leans in to meet him. Beneath them, on a bed of ice, a chorus of upright fish heads stare vacantly skyward, mouths open.
Joanie grew up with us, dated us, was disappointed in us. She worked her way through the local talent methodically, thoughtfully, as if she were trying to guess a password one character at a time. After we failed to measure up, I expected she’d turn to some urban slick with a German car and a lawyer’s haircut, but that never happened. When her father died, she stepped into his place at the fish market, secure behind the counter, like it was what she’d always wanted. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between destiny and the path of least resistance.
My turn with Joanie came a year after graduation, a couple of dinner-and-a-movie Fridays and a single night of dancing that didn’t go well. We both moved on, no discussion necessary. Thirteen years later, she’s the person I buy my scallops from. I think we’re both fine with that. Some of the other guys in here holding their little pink tickets could tell you almost the same story.
Thirty-One whispers to Joanie, like he’s confessing his sins to a priest. Joanie nods, reaches into her case with a gloved hand, and he retreats through the crowd with a tightly wrapped bundle of cod.
There’s a hand on my forearm. The Safecracker. He doesn’t know me well enough to touch me, but I let it go.
“Fifty-three!” Joanie calls.
The Safecracker looks at the slip of paper in my hand, pinched between thumb and forefinger. “What the hell happened to forty-eight? Or fifty-one?” he asks the room. No one answers.
“You’ll be happier if you don’t worry about that kind of thing,” I say. I gave up on figuring out the fish market’s numbers a long time ago. Joanie keeps the score. She gets to you when it’s your turn, and that’s it.
Fifty-Three steps forward, a woman with impossibly red hair. Her face takes me a moment to place: last week, a bar across from the bus yard. Nets and crab pots nailed to the walls, a plastic seagull perched by the door. We played eye-games over the heads of the drinkers, but never made it to the same table. A mystery, a might-have-been.
She collects a dozen sizeable shrimp, and on the way to the exit her shoulder brushes past mine, a moment of contact. If she recognizes me, she swallows the memory.
“Seventy-one!”
Seventy-One draws herself to her full height with the assistance of a pair of nosebleed heels. The customers rearrange themselves as she passes, and, avoiding an elbow here and a handbag there, she presents herself to Joanie. Cherry red jacket over what look like black pajamas. The nails match the jacket. She orders in a girlboss alto, two lobsters, ready for the pot.
Not so simple, though. Joanie points. Affixed to the front of the lobster tank is a handwritten sign, a list of names in a rainbow of colors: Franklin in coral blue, Rachel in crocodile green, Carlotta in lemon yellow. Inside the tank, the dominant claw of each lobster is bound shut by a corresponding-colored band.
“I know they’re just bugs,” says Joanie. “Maybe not as clever as us. But they desire things. They’re happier some days than others. We call them by their names.”
Seventy-One examines Joanie’s face, the unblemished skin, the sculpted eyebrows. She finds no humor at the corners of her eyes, no incipient smile concealed in the curve of her lips. Joanie means it.
She doesn’t want to play this stupid game, but she does want a pair of lobsters. Seventy-One meets Joanie’s gaze, weighs her options, and blinks. Peering into the tank, she matches a rose band and an orange one to the list of names. “Mercedes,” she says. “And Josephine.”
Joanie dips into the tank with a short wooden rake. The struggle is one-sided. Mercedes and Josephine are boxed up and handed over to Seventy-One.
“Eighty-three!”
The Safecracker straightens at the sound of Joanie’s voice, and she mistakes him for her customer. He beams at Joanie and her brows rise, a question beginning to form, but the true Eighty-Three steps forward, ticket held high, and the question dissolves before it can take shape.
The Safecracker catches at my sleeve. He wears a look of concern. “When we get up there – it’ll come off better if you buy something, right?” He reaches beneath his untucked shirt and tugs his pants up.
I nod. “I like the look of those scallops,” I say, and point with my chin. The Safecracker follows. On the other side of the glass, the scallops sit in the bottom halves of their shells, arranged on the crushed ice in a pattern suggesting the scales of a fish. Each cream-colored disk shares its shell with a crescent of roe, floating atop the scallop like an eyebrow above an eye.
The Safecracker squints. “Never seen the orange things before. What the hell are those?”
“Reproductive organs,” I say. He smirks at my delicate choice of words. “They cut them off frozen scallops. You won’t see them outside a fish market.”
“No kidding? So she’s got a bunch of bull-scallops penned up in there.”
“Half-right,” I say. “Hermaphrodites. Male and female. Scallops have both sets of equipment. Improves their odds.”
The Safecracker considers this possibility. “Stuck inside that shell, I guess they have to think of something. Not much fun being a scallop.”
“Not much.”
Joanie stands above the glass, attending to Eighty-Three. The Safecracker lifts his eyes from the scallops and runs them along the visible portion of Joanie, a retail mermaid, half woman, half refrigerated display. He is soft-eyed, worshipful, gazing upon her as though she’d just emerged from the surf, ushered out of a giant seashell by a pair of fleshy cherubs.
Joanie surveys the customers, a slow scan. She might be looking for someone, or just counting heads. Her eyes flick to the Safecracker, once, twice, but she catches herself the third time. A shadow passes over her features, a tightening of the jaw, an extra line crossing her forehead. “Ninety-seven!”
Again, the Safecracker checks my ticket. The number is not ninety-seven, and he grunts his frustration. He stoops, gathers a double handful of tickets from the floor, and starts to thumb through them. I’ve seen guys at the racetrack who do this, scooping up betting slips from the ground, looking for winning numbers some dope tossed away by mistake.
Ninety-Seven makes himself known: a pimply-faced guy playing a game on his phone, guiding cartoon jellyfish through a maze of billowing fishing nets. The man is pushing forty, too old for pimples, too old for playing games. I wonder if the two conditions are related.
A trio of haddock is nestled into the ice beside a cobblestone arrangement of perch fillets. Ninety-Seven points at the central haddock, asks to smell it. Joanie’s eyebrows slide north. Forget the pimples, forget the coffee spots hiding in the pattern of his madras shirt. Joanie recognizes a man who knows his way around a fish market.
She gathers the haddock in her gloved hands, cradles it, inspecting the fish before she presents it to Ninety-Seven. She brushes away a shard of ice clinging to the edge of the tail, runs her gloved hand down the length of the fish to align the dorsal fins. She gives a nod to Ninety-Seven, or it might be the slightest of bows, and extends her hands, presenting the haddock in cupped palms, as though it were a bowl of ceremonial tea. Beneath the yellow latex, her hands are enormous, powerful.
The Safecracker bites his lips as Ninety-Seven bends from the waist and, straight-backed, brings his nose within an inch of the haddock and inhales deeply. There is desperation in the Safecracker’s eyes. He is undone by the intimacy of the exchange. He twists and folds the mass of paper tickets, as if his hands can’t bear to remain still. Something is beginning to take shape.
Ninety-Seven nods in approval, directing the gesture at the fish rather than to Joanie. The haddock remains indifferent. With a smile whose warmth seems to go beyond the requirements of mere commerce, Joanie wraps the man’s purchase in clean white paper, and thanks him for his business.
Joanie’s tango with Ninety-Seven has left a flush on her cheeks. “One-oh-one!” she calls. No one steps forward. “One-oh-three!” Still, no one. “One-oh-seven!” I’ve seen this happen before, a string of numbers whose owners have disappeared, or perhaps never existed.
The Safecracker drops his eyes to the wad of tickets in his hands, twisted and worried into a torpedo. He discovers something among the curls and creases of paper, maybe one of the missing numbers, maybe something else. His fingers return to their work with new purpose.
Our time will come, but not yet. Joanie wraps up two pounds of salmon for One-Oh-Nine and listens with professional patience as One-Thirteen explains in a stage whisper why she can no longer eat mackerel. “It gives me the most awful gas,” she says. “Why does it do that? No one warned me. No one.”
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” The Safecracker has recovered from Joanie’s encounter with Ninety-Seven. I nod, perhaps without the expected enthusiasm. This is not a path I want to walk.
Joanie summons One-Twenty-Seven and One-Thirty-Nine and sends them on their way with neatly wrapped bundles. “We’re getting close,” says Safecracker. “You’ve got our ticket?” I don’t like this presumption, that we’ve become accomplices. I suppress the urge to point out that I got here first, that I’m the one who acquired ticket one-fifty-seven.
The Safecracker readies himself, raises his chin, tries to square his rounded shoulders. He fixes his gaze on Joanie, who is inspecting a bowl of heavily bearded mussels as though she’s never before seen such a thing. The Safecracker tugs his nylon jacket into place, rakes his fingers through his stringy hair.
After a moment of stillness, Joanie’s chin floats upward, settles. “One-fifty-seven.” She does not yell this time. Before she finishes announcing the number, Joanie’s eyes find the Safecracker’s, and there’s something going on here.
An unseen force connects the two, a cylinder of invisible light, a wormhole tunneling through space.
On one end is the Safecracker, widow’s-peaked, dressed like a cab driver, nothing going for him except the boundless, unreasoning adoration beaming out of his rumpled face.
On the other end, Joanie. Tight ponytail. Face so hard, so smooth it could be porcelain. She is the cop writing you a ticket, the teacher who caught you texting under your desk.
I retreat a step. The Safecracker won’t be needing me. I consider the slip of paper in my hand. The number is no longer mine. I release it, let it drop to the floor.
He steps to the display case, plants himself in the crescent of vacant space. His mouth opens, but nothing comes out, it hangs there, frozen, agape. He is twelve years old, in love with the piano teacher beside him on the bench, smelling of medicated lip balm and dollar-store body powder.
Joanie has set aside her script, the routine of give and take that exists between a customer, a woman, and a pound of fish. She doesn’t offer, and the Safecracker doesn’t ask. She waits, her lips a horizontal line, arms akimbo.
The Safecracker extends his hands, one cupped around the other, as though he’s shielding a candle flame from the breeze. As the Safecracker reaches across the glass, eases his hands toward Joanie, flashes of color, the salmon of the tickets, escape from between his fingers.
He penetrates the no-man’s-land of the counter until his hands are closer to Joanie’s heart than to his own. She stands her ground. He lifts the top hand slowly, steadily, as if he’s afraid of frightening whatever is underneath. There in the Safecracker’s palm is a fish, a fish made of cast-off paper, pink, intricate, sharply creased, magical. Triangular fins, fan-shaped tail, a gaping mouth.
The Safecracker checks Joanie’s attention, holds up an index finger. He has a wild look to him now, like a street preacher gone feral. Joanie meets his gaze, her face a poker player’s mask. She waits, shoulders back, gloved fists on her hips. The Safecracker runs his finger slowly, even tenderly, along the top of his fish, beginning just behind the eyes and continuing along to the fish’s tail. As his finger passes, a row of dorsal spines spring erect, one after another. He squints, adjusts one spine, tugs at another, nods to himself, and holds the fish up to Joanie. Wide-eyed, she inspects his creation.
The Safecracker gives the head a tap, and, impossibly, the fish begins to move, paper body flexing, mouth opening and closing, fins waving, gills fluttering. As it undulates, it exposes the secrets of its construction: a printed 3 appears and disappears as the mouth opens and closes; part of a 7 peeks out from under a gill flap.
Now that the fish has been awakened, a single palm is too small to contain it. The Safecracker brings his hands together, presents the fish to her, an offering.
“Yours,” he says, “if that’s what you want.”
Joanie’s hands leave her hips. Her eyes are unreadable, flat, the eyes of a kestrel. They run along the Safecracker’s rumpled form, head to toe and back again, taking stock.
Whatever miracle has given the fish movement seems inexhaustible, at least for the moment. She extends a wet glove toward the creature, her fingers spread, the talons of a great bird. The fish’s writhing becomes faster, even frantic.
As the shadow of her hand crosses the Safecracker’s open palms, the undulations of the fish resolve into a single shiver that travels the length of its body. The Safecracker, eyes shut tight, whispers something that might be a prayer, or it might be his true name.
Daniel Cohen is from Boston and has the accent to prove it. He’s earned his living fixing telephones, washing pots, and teaching at UMass Amherst and Tufts. He was nominated for the 2025 Pushcart Prize and won this summer’s Peatsmoke Editor’s Prize for flash fiction. To date, he has struck three Nobel laureates (two economists and a chemist) with paper airplanes.
