Fish market

   When Brody woke up, the light entering his room was practically nonexistent. The only object illuminating his room was the alarm clock he had always had beside the bed. He sat on his bed for a few minutes and just stayed there, fighting the urge to fall asleep. But finally he put his two feet out of bed and walked towards the bathroom. There, he woke up even more due to the light, which was very bright. He had thought of buying another light bulb for the bathroom but he always forgot. He removed his boxers and let the water run in the shower. When it was warm, he entered half asleep, almost leaning too much against one of the shower’s walls. He didn’t really want to go to work. He just wanted to fall asleep for several hours and only wake up when he was fully rested.

 But that wasn’t happening. He got in front of the water, in order to wake up properly and spend the following five minutes trying to wake up the rest of his body. When he got back to his room, towel around his body, there was still no light outside. The world was submerged in the darkness and he was one of those unfortunate souls that had to wander through the lack of light in order to earn a living. Or something like that, anyway. He let the towel fall to the ground and then spent some minutes looking for clothes. The proof that he was still asleep was that he dressed up in the weirdest way: he put on a t-shirt first, and then the socks followed by a jacket. Then he got to his boxers and finally some pants. He almost forgot to put on underwear but he realized it in time.

 When he was finally ready, he came out of his room and into a small room outside where the kitchen was. The apartment was not very big but it was just the size he needed it to be. He could bring friends and have some beers but it wasn’t the best place for a party, even if he had already tried (often), to have some of those in there. He drank orange juice straight from the bottle and then grabbed the milk and poured some into a cup. He had it with cereal, eating standing up and closing his eyes from time to time. He so wanted to sleep. And it wasn’t only because he was tired but because he remembered bits and pieces of a great dream he had been having and he knew it was one of the good ones.

 When he finished eating, he went back to his bathroom and brushed his teeth. As he did, he looked at his face and did funny faces in order to make himself laugh or at least attempting to make his eyes look a little bit more open. But it was to no avail. He finally took a backpack from the floor of his bedroom and then just went out the door. He went down the stairs rather fast and at the bottom he received a powerful gust of wind right in his face. It was very cold and already blue outside, not yet full of light but in an annoying twilight that could last a couple of hours. He closed his jacket and walked on.

 The bus was always on time and that day it wasn’t the exception. People were already making a line to get into it so he almost got to stay because of how filled with people the bus was. He had to take a little space at the back, between the window and an elderly woman that smelled a lot like onions. He was thankful the trip was not that long, or he would have collapsed due to the odor. Maybe she was from a region where they grew a lot of onions because she wasn’t carrying a bag with them or anything. He looked at other people in the bus and there were any like him: head going from side to side, eyes closing for a few seconds, then opening as if nothing had happened. There was a young student already fast asleep. He felt sorry for him, as it was likely he would overshoot his stop.

 Finally, the bus arrived at his destination: the market. The place was very active already, even for the hour. Most people were owners of the stands. With the help of their employees, they were filling their areas with fruits and vegetables and many other delicious things to eat like mushrooms and dried fruit. He had to walk past all of that area to get to the next building, where he had to work. It was the place where the meat and fish were sold. The stand he worked at was in an intersection of paths, which was perfect for business, as every single shopper would see their products, no matter the way they were coming from. The owner complained a lot but he was pretty successful.

 When Brody arrived, he told him he should have arrived sooner as it was the day they got fresh octopus. And when he said fresh, he meant alive. It was Brody’s job to get those creatures into a tank in order to have them in display like lobsters. He actually didn’t like to do that because it reminded him a lot of those movies that show how everything once when there was slavery. Of course an octopus is not a person but he felt back for the poor fellow anyway. He put on his boots, apron and “mouth cover” and started helping his boss putting everything into display. Fortunately, the boss decided to fight the octopus himself, so he didn’t have to experience that sad episode again.

 All fish were in boxes and he just had to put them on the ice over the refrigerator where every single costumer could see how fresh and clean and beautiful everything was. It was a nice thing to do and he was already used to the smell. He sometimes did some changes in the display, forming words with the fish and he always did it without the permission of his boss. For a person that claimed to be in control of everything, he never realized what was going on in his own stand. The truth was he always negotiating and going around asking if other had made more money than him and what new products were being sold.

 The morning rush started just as the only octopus of the day was finally inside his enclosure and all the rest of his marine friends were well displayed in the stand. Just then arrive Marcus, a huge man that spoke once every year, which happened to be the one to cut, chop and gut every single fish that was going to be sold. He never helped organize things and he always left before the boss could ask him to help them clean. That was Brody’s job and also cashier and actual salesman. He convinced people to shop there and he gave them the best deals, trying to make them good for the boss too but sometimes just looking to sell something as he knew his salary depended a lot on how many fish got to leave in some old lady’s bags.

 It started a bit slow but as natural light grew larger in the outside, the more people came in to buy their rations of seafood for the day. In the stand, they did not only sell fish and octopus but also clams, squid, mussels and many other creatures. As more and more people started to come in, Brody had a nicer time. It was fun to explain to people the differences between some types of fish and others and how they could cook them and make a delicious seafood soup. Many were actually surprised he knew so much about cooking. The thing was he had decided to learn all he could about what he was selling and the natural thing was also to learn how to cook what he was selling. At home, he had already tried every recipe he recommended and it was always a success.

 In the afternoon, things began coming to an end. People had already had lunch and very few buyers bought fish for dinner so late. They came for it in the morning. So at four or five in the afternoon, depending of the day, they closed shop, put into boxes everything that had not being sold and began cleaning their stands with hoses as fish guts had to be pushed into a main drain. It was Brody who did all of that because Marcus left and his boss was too busy trying to calculate how much money he had made in one day. The octopus was the last one to be put away. Thankfully for him, no one had wanted to cook him for a meal.

 Thirty minutes after closing, Brody cleaned his boots and apron, put them in the backpack and bid farewell to the boss. He hoped for Friday to come soon as he got his paycheck then. He had worked hard all month and, as he walked towards the bus stop ( again in the twilight), he repeated his plans in his head: he wanted to be a chef and had to get the right amount of money to study to be one of the best cooks in the country. Inside the bus, people moved because he still smelled like fish. He didn’t mind, it was an acquired taste. When he got home he enjoyed a warm shower and got into bed early, without eating. He had to save money and he couldn’t afford dining every day.

 His dream was the most important thing to him and he was willing to sacrifice a bit of himself in order to get access to it. Before falling asleep, however, his only thought was a clam chowder, nice and warm, with all the proper ingredients.

All wrong

   Alan put one finger in the water: it was perfect. He closed the tap and took off his towel. He put it on a hanger just by the tub and then entered the water, laying peacefully in the tub, closing his eyes and smiling calmly. He hadn’t been properly relaxed for many days because of work and family and he had decided to take this Sunday to just be at peace with himself, enjoying what he liked and doing everything for him only.

 He opened his eyes remembering he hadn’t used the bath foam he had bought a day ago in the mall. He stood up, carefully stepped on the floor mat and walked to the sink. He grabbed the small bottle and poured some in the water. Then, when he was about to enter the calm of the bubbles, he heard the intercom’s sound. He decided not to answer it but then it kept on ringing. He grabbed the towel, put it around him and went to the kitchen to answer the call. Apparently someone from work had come to visit him and leave some documents. He asked the man to say he didn’t want any visitors but then he heard another voice: it was his boss and apparently he had come with his wife. There was no way to say no.

 He put on an old t-shirt and some gym pants and received them. He thought his clothing would make them go away but they certainly didn’t. The truth was his boss was very fond of him but he didn’t like him in return. He was the kind of person that would use other people’s time freely, as if it was his own. Alan had to give them some cookies he had gotten from his mother as well as coffee he had prepared for a post-tub breakfast.

 Their visit seemed eternal. Who visited an employee at nine in the morning on Sunday? His hatred of his boss grew exponentially as he told him his stupid stories about the club and encounter had had with a well-known actor in the airport and when he had gone to Thailand. Alan did not want to know any of that. He couldn’t give a fuck about what his boss did outside of work and, clearly, his boss didn’t really cared about his employee’s lives.

 Then, after all his stupid stories, he confessed he had only come to visit in order to give Alan some papers that he should read for a reunion the following morning. And the he just left, as if nothing had happened. Alan decided not to ask why he hadn’t sent those damn papers by email or with a courier or some other way. Why did he have to come and bother the only person that visibly disliked him in the office? It was funny how Alan really did not express any animosity for him but then he was all nice and kind to Alan.

 He tried to not think about work, leaving the papers on his coffee table. Alan walked back to the bathroom, where the bath foam had grown so much it was spilling on the sides of the bathtub. Deciding he didn’t really mind about it, he took off his clothes, left them on the floor and put one foot in the water. He almost fell backwards when he felt the icy cold water that was beneath the foam. Now he had to empty the tub and fill it with hot water again. Half of the cold water out would be enough to fill it again.

 When most of the water was out, he opened the hot water tap to refill it. He also added some more of the foam solution, as most of it had gone down the drain with the cold water. Then, the doorbell rang again. Alan let out an exasperated sound. He was going to kill the doorman if he had let someone in without asking him. He grabbed his towel and went to the door almost running. Before he realized he could have just not answer it, he had opened the door.

 It was his neighbor Marco, a big guy that apparently spent every hour of the day at the gym. Sure enough, he wore the right attire to go and work out but that wasn’t important right then. He was holding a white cat, very fluffy with a flat face.

 - Hey man. I was wondering if you could take care of Snowball for a few hours. I            normally leave with my…

 He’s face looked as if he had forgotten the word he was about to say or even why he was there. Alan stared impatient, looking from Marco’s stupid face, to his cat’s face and then back to Marco’s. Then, he realized he was only wearing a towel, which could fall at any moment because he had not put it correctly in the haste.

 - Am I interrupting something? – He said, looking at something over Alan’s shoulder,  which wasn’t very hard to do as he was very tall.

 - Kinda… - in a very cold voice.

 - Cool…. So my girlfriend won’t take him. She’s busy and can’t do it. So would you do  it? Just for a few hours. She has already eaten and she’s very well behaved.

 He held the cat in front of Alan’s face, as if the animal was an offering a weird sacrifice ritual. Alan took the cat that tried to release himself from the man’s arms, and told Marco not to be late because he had a very busy day ahead. Marco just nodded, smiling in a way he looked like a very small child. He gave the cat a pat in the head and then headed down the stairs.

 After closing the door, Alan left the cat on the floor and turned to go in the bathroom. But the cat crossed his path and tried to attract his attention. The creature just roared softly and circled him with his fluffy tail but Alan had no time for this. He grabbed the cat, walked back to the living room and left him there. But when he tried to leave, the cat would cross his path again. He grabbed it once more but then realized the cat’s paws were wet. He was about to yell in fury because he thought it was cat piss but it wasn’t.

 There was a very large puddle of water, still advancing, from the bathroom. Then he remembered the open water tap. He threw the cat away, which landed softly on the floor, and ran towards the bathroom, his towel falling to the damped floor. He almost fell trying to close the tab of water. There was soapy foam all over and the tub kept spilling water to the floor. He finally was able to close the tap and drain the water out of the tub. Now he was wet and soapy all over and his towel was more of a wet cloth than anything else.

 He went to the kitchen and when he was about to grab the mop, the doorbell rang again. Exasperated and frustrated because of his failure to be at peace, he opened the door, slamming in hard against the opposite wall.

 - What? What the fuck is it now?!

 On the other side of the door stood his landlady, an elderly woman who was always accompanied to the upper floors by the doorman, who stood behind her. They both stared at Alan and then the woman yelled and started saying things so loud no one really understood. But Alan did get one of the words: “Pervert”. And then he realized that he was still naked, having not replaced the wet towel with a clean one.

 He slammed the door shut and, for some reason, put the security chain on. He could hear the old lady yelling all the way to the elevator and the doorman trying to calm her down. It was a disaster. Alan just remembered she had told him she would visit in order to negotiate an extension on his rent contract, which he needed to do because of the great price and place he had there. Now that was, like the bathtub foam, down the drain.

 He slid down to the floor, covering his face with his face, frustrated and sad that this so-called “peace” day had been a total failure. Then, with his eyes covered, he heard a weird scratching sound. Panicked, he put his arms aside and realized that Snowball had been quiet, too quiet until now. As he got close to the sofa, he realized the cat was cutting it open, strings of fabric on the floor and even some of the foam from the cushions.

 But that wasn’t the only thing. The papers on the coffee table were now on the floor. And no one could say now what they had been because there was only a bunch of paper strips beneath the table. Alan looked at the cat, which meowed joyfully to him and kept on going with his destruction work.

Adele and the Island

  Adele exhilarated but undoubtedly happy and eager to see and learn more. She was diving, not very deep but had been doing it now for about three hours and she had no intention to stop. So many beautiful creatures were there, so much natural magic that she had no intention of leaving, no matter what happened.

But at lunchtime, the rest of the team was famished and in need of food. Adele had to concede that she too was hungry and they all came back to port to have a nice dinner of shellfish and recently caught sea bass. It was delicious although it seemed weird to be eating a creature she had just seen swimming free in the ocean.

Adele was, in no way, a vegetarian or a vegan. She had no intention to be either. The woman knew that humans need to feed and it was natural to do it, as long as the resources were not depleted. In here, this small island just a few kilometers from the mainland, the consumption of fish and all other animals was controlled and they were very careful not to risk the environment, which actually gave them the money to keep their island pristine and beautiful.

The woman, aged 35 or so, had come here for good. She had visited the island several times with family, friends and past boyfriends and had decided she was meant to live there. She looked up for jobs in the island or near it and had found that the harbor restaurant needed a waitress and also someone who knew numbers to properly run the place. And Adele was just right for both jobs.

At first, Ron thought she was bluffing. He had established the restaurant twenty years ago and was very careful when hiring people to work there. He looked for people that not only worked but also loved the sea and respected the food. He had interviewed at least a dozen people, two dozens for both jobs and no one had caught her interest, until Adele came by.

She confessed she needed to get way from it all. The woman didn’t say her reasons for that but assured Ron that she knew how to make people feel welcome. Adele handled the owner of the restaurant her resume and told him she had worked with money before and had always been entrusted by her employers. As a matter of fact, she had never been laid off. She had always just moved on because, as she put it, she needed to keep on rolling.

Ron decided to hire her for both jobs but warned Adele that he needed both jobs taken care of very specially and that he wouldn’t be very happy if she left one for the other or left one of them unattended for long. He was sure she wasn’t going to be able to cope with both positions at the same time. It was simply too difficult.

But surprisingly, she managed to do it just fine. Adele was a dedicated person and, once she put her mind into something, she was unstoppable. She had decided to work the numbers when the orders got slow and even asked Ron if she could stay one more hour a day to leave everything in order. She rapidly picked up a nice pace in the establishment and was soon the preferred waitress of visitors and residents alike.

As she didn’t work the weekends, Adele spent them diving with the local enthusiasts that numbered around a dozen. They would leave in a rather small boat to a spot near the island, filled with fish and other creatures, thanks to the presence of a beautiful, unspoiled coral reef. For Adele, it was the best. She felt relaxed in the water. Besides, she also felt like an explorer, entering a new world each time.

What made her a great waitress too was the fact that she shared all of her diving stories with the people that came in the restaurant. Every dish they asked for was a short story told by Adele about a certain kind of fish or an interesting anecdote about diving. And people, most of them at least, really enjoyed her stories and even came back for more.

It was worrying, though, when she had no stories to tell or when she felt somehow “not there”. It happened rarely but Ron noticed it always happened towards the end of the month, the exact time when the mail boat would come into the island to deliver packages and letters. Any person living in the island that wanted a faster service could get a personal mailbox in the city in the mainland, at least sixty kilometers away.

When Ron asked Adele about why she seemed sad or simply away, she answered she would never put her two jobs aside. And so she did. Adele never let the work pile up, even in her “strange days”. She was a very responsible person. Anyway, Ron wasn’t asking her how she felt because of work but because he was worried about her. Both him and his wife had become very close to Adele and it hurt them that she had decided to be so private with her life, not telling them anything about it.

Eventually, they stopped asking him what went on with her mood at the end of each month. And it didn’t happen because they didn’t care but because they knew she would never say anything. So they just stopped and she didn’t even noticed. She kept on working and telling her stories and diving and being sad for no apparent reason.

That was until a letter came, almost one exact year after she had arrived to the island. Her many friends on the island, practically all the inhabitants of the small piece of land, were preparing her a party to celebrate her first year as an islander. The party was to feature the ocean, seafood and a case of beer specially brought from the mainland.

But that last letter changed that. The day of the party, she didn’t go to work. She wasn’t in the house in which she had been living in for the last few months and wasn’t diving anywhere near the island. Many people had seen her read the letter right in the harbor but, after that, no one really knew where she had gone.

Many said she had boarded the mail boat, arguing with the man that drove it but finally negotiating with money. Others were sure she had gone to the Big Tree, the only so called park the island had on it. It was really a small square of grass with, in the middle, a huge tree giving shadow to a couple of houses. It was a popular spot for lovers or people that wanted a peaceful place to think. Others said she had resumed working or gone to her house, but they were proven wrong very fast.

So, for many days, no one knew anything about Adele. Ron was especially upset, as she had left her two jobs hanging, for which he didn’t look for a replacement. He told his wife that he was sure Adele was going to come back, eventually. But as the time passed, that thought began to dissolve in time.

A young woman named Arisha replaced Adele as a waitress and Ron decided to take over the accounting duties. Anyway, the restaurant was fairly easy to handle and it was only during the holiday season that he really needed a lot of help to keep the place running properly. Anyway, Arisha was a very dedicated young lady and, although she wasn’t really experienced and didn’t tell any stories, she did the job right and was sure she could do better.

It was during the holiday season, in a really hot day, when the mail boat arrived and a letter addressed to Ron arrived to the restaurant. He was busy cooking some burgers so he only opened it at night, when he had done everything to make the holiday visitors happy. Walking home, he realized the letter was from Adele and quickly opened it, reading it outside his house.

In not so many words, Adele told him she was ashamed of herself and the way she had left the island, to the extent of leaving everything she had owned in the small house she had inhabited in. She told Ron that the reason why she had left had been simple: she couldn’t bear staying in one place too long. She had never liked that, even if she felt at peace and she certainly did in the island. Anyway, the real reason was that a former lover, a man she was going to marry once, would write her every month to tell her he still loved her deeply. She avoided him, even if she felt still guilty, until the last letter came in.

The man who loved her had suffered an accident and was in critical condition. Adele left everything to be with him but was not able to get there in time. He had died. She stayed, even if she wanted to live, to see him being buried and to see her family again. But that was just another signal to leave.

She wrote Ron from a ski resort and told him she would love to see him and all her other friends soon, in due time, once she felt she was strong enough.

-       “To be honest, I will never be strong enough for anything. I had no idea what I had around until I lost it because of fear and insecurities. Anyway I hope I see you again, wherever, whenever”.

Ron shared the letter with his wife and kept it in a drawer, waiting for the day he could see Adele again to talk and tell her it was ok to stop running, as no one had never been chasing her.