Creative Nonfiction
First Fish: A Triptych
by Chauna Craig
I.
I am five years old wearing my reddish-brown hair in pigtails, and my face says it all: eyes squinting against the afternoon sun, lips twisted into the facsimile of a smile. I am supposed to be proud, triumphant as I stand on the tiny porch to the cabin, an eight-inch rainbow trout threaded through the gills onto the long stick I’m holding out toward the camera. My first fish.
But my fist grips the very bottom of the stick, arm extended to keep the dead, gaping, staring thing from touching me. I insist it is slimy, and my teenaged aunt, never one for behaviors that seem “girly,” tries to coax me to run my fingers along its smooth side, to prove me wrong. I have already been made to pose for this picture, to document an event that has not turned out as I expected. Someone makes me bend my elbow so the fish is in the frame, and I instinctively suck my stomach back, afraid its swinging fan tail will brush my shirt. I feel its weight in my trembling arms, but I smile as I’m told until I hear the snap and then the whir of advancing film.
Limit reached, bedrock of stubbornness woven into my DNA. I am done. It takes every scrap of child-sized patience not to fling stick and fish into the dry grass. But then someone hands the fish to my little brother to take his picture with my fish, and I feel a stab of righteous fury. My fish.
Tony Anglund, owner of a cabin across the meadow, took us kids to the swimming hole to teach us to fish. I don’t know why my father or grandfather or aunt, all of them avid fishers, didn’t. Maybe they had already tried, or maybe our neighbor had offered and everyone had been glad for the break from our noise and energy in the small space of the cabin. But Tony walked us down to the river with junior-sized fishing poles and live bait, and he took charge of all the grisly worm-stabbing and helped us learn to cock back our arms to catapult the hook and worm as far into the river as we could cast. I loved the gentle kerplunk on the surface and the slow, steady reeling (still do…repetition as meditation). I could have kept casting and reeling, happily, long after my brother gave up to throw rocks, but then the line jerked as I started to wind the reel, and I froze, clutching the pole. Tony’s face lit up as he praised my skill, his arms around mine to help, my brother at my side as all of us watched something cutting through the water, coming closer and taking the shape of a decent-sized fish as I, or more likely Tony, reeled it in.
We landed it on the grassy shore, both of us kids watching in fascination and horror as it flipped in bursts of electric energy, gills flexing until the trout exhausted itself and Tony scooped it up and bashed its skull on a rock so fast I wasn’t sure what had happened. He smiled, congratulated me, held the fish out like an offering.
“Don’t you want to hold it?” As if this yucky, bloody-gilled thing with its terrible, accusing eye were a baby doll or kitten.
I told him he could keep it, and he delighted in repeating this story back at our cabin where I was made to pretend in a photo that I wanted this fish I’d caught.
My brother stands on the porch against our red screen door, grinning, chest puffed out, fish held up like a trophy. I tell everyone who will listen that he did not catch it, that it is my fish. They snap pictures and remind me that I didn’t want it and therefore get no say.
Nothing sets me off, even now, like having “no say.” I don’t remember what happened next. I think my family sent the fish home with Tony Anglund because we were leaving the next day, no time to clean and cook a trout. I only know that I had no say in what happened to the fish that had taken the worm on the end of the line I’d thrown into the river. Given the option, I would have released it, returned to the easy joy of flinging something far away from me on an invisible line that I could bring back over and over. I had no say in taking the fish to the cabin, forced to claim it in a five-second pose that made it mine forever before my brother, only three, owned it better than I did: proud, triumphant.
I imagine even now that he sees that photo in the album collected of his childhood photos and taps it with a false, fond memory. My first fish.
II.
Summers at the cabin stack in my mind like clouds on the horizon: merging into one great bank of memories stretching slowly, drifting. Sometimes spreading to reveal separate, wispy boundaries, one year to the next. Sometimes morphing so one summer is remembered as another.
I had no children of my own that summer Andy caught his first fish. He was maybe nine or ten, still more fascinated with the natural world than with pleasures reliant on batteries. We—he, his father, his younger sister, and I—were all down by the swimming hole where the river widens and slows into a lazy pool, deep enough that brave and foolish teen boys forge the river to the other side to carefully pick their way up the cliff, all toeholds and crumbling limestone shelves, before pausing on a landing halfway up, before making the leap. Joyful plummet to the water below, into the murky depths where the huge and wily browns evade detection.
That day: no one but us.
Andy called to me from just south of the swimming hole, where there was no gradual sloping beach, but a sharply defined bank, weedy and still green. His patient sister, bug-lover and people-pleaser, the born fisher, was casting downstream with her father, and Andy, like me, had a pole and a lure, but was really there to explore and play. Like me.
He pointed into the water to a sucker, what my aunt always called a “trash fish” before throwing it back. I knew something was wrong. The fish was close to the bank, close to the surface, just floating there, unbothered by our shadows, its gills flaring rarely. Sometimes it would tilt, like a damaged submarine, then gradually right itself, drifting a little.
Andy dangled his lure above the fish, dipping it into the water near its mouth. “Leave it alone,” I said. “It’s hurt, probably dying. Besides,” I added. “It’s a trash fish.” Many years later I learned that suckers and mountain whitefish are native to the river, unlike the sought-after rainbow and brown trout. In fact, they were likely valued as food sources for prehistoric peoples in the canyon. Not at all how I’d been taught to think of them.
I couldn’t bear to watch the fish, whatever its relative value, suffering in the shallows, and I wandered back to the beach in search of rocks flat and smooth enough to skip.
Soon the wandering fishers cast their way back in view, and then I heard a shout and a whoop, Andy’s father calling, “He caught a fish!” I walked the shore to join them and saw, dangling limp and resigned from the end of the line, the same, sad sucker I’d told my stepson to leave alone. Thrill shone in Andy’s eyes, envy in his sister’s. Pride in their father’s. All I felt was anger as I told his father the fish was already dying, unable to swim away, probably starving. “I told him to leave it alone,” I emphasized.
“He caught it,” his dad said. “His first fish.”
It doesn’t count, I thought.
The dying fish had summoned its last reserves of energy to lunge for the meal dangled directly before it. It had finally taken the lure, getting only a mouthful of sharp metal, the hook now winking from its too-small, puckered carp mouth while Andy’s father tried to work it loose.
Andy had caught the fish; I wasn’t denying that. But he’d ignored my instructions, and, more, this catch seemed like cheating, somewhat cruel to persist in offering a wounded creature whatever it wants badly enough that it will lunge for your hook against healthier self-preservation. What sport in that? What possible victory?
“His first fish,” Andy’s father slowly repeated, eyes dark and staring, daring me to say otherwise.
I watched a red flag of blood unfurling down the fish’s white belly. I felt my cheeks burn with shame for trying to spoil a boy’s big moment, for failing (again) in the parenting role I’d been assigned. Finally unhooked, the fish was thrown back in the water. But it didn’t swim; the current carried its pale corpse, backward and upside down, away.
Over the next couple days I urged Andy to go fishing alone with his dad. I wanted him to feel the thrill of the strike and pull from unseen depths. I wanted, too, to redeem myself. But he’d caught his fish, and he’d moved on.
Years later, when I asked Andy what he remembered of his first fish at the cabin, he recalled frustration at never getting anything. Then he added (hedging, saying his memory could be wrong) that he remembered seeing a fish near the riverbank and trying for and getting it, only then he didn’t want to touch it and his dad had to throw it back because it was too small, and he thinks he was mad about that.
I wonder now why I needed him all those years ago to try again, to catch his first fish the “right” way. I asked for his memory partly to confirm mine, to trust I’m telling the right story, when I know we are in fact only ever telling our stories. Andy’s: the story of relief and satisfaction after wanting something then getting it and wanting it no more. Mine: the story of an insecure stepmother struggling to please an impossible man, furious with herself as she grew more and more exhausted but still lunged for the dangling hook again and again. Always left wanting.
Andy remembers the fish near the bank, not that it was already dying and an easy target. I remember my fury and then shame over dampening a child’s memory of his first fish. Except I learned that I didn’t do that after all. Time, I realize, to finally let that fish go.
III.
On the west wall of the cabin’s sleeping porch, on a shelf by the screen door, sits a square of cardboard with a yellow and red Panther Martin lure hooked in and a small note in my ex-husband’s angular, childish print: Wyn’s first fish/ brown trout 10 ½” with the date scrawled up the side, 7/30/2014, and his age, 8 years old.
This is all I know of the event: a lure and a date. Did they kill it and keep it and fry it for dinner? Did they release the brown back to the river? Did my son work the hook out of the gaping jaw or, like me and his older brother, did he recoil from trying to hold that scaled sleeve of powerful muscle at the end of the line? How did he feel? What did he think? What does he remember, his childhood memories divided and assigned to one parent or the other?
I don’t know the answers to these questions. I don’t ask. I wonder what he will think to share. In this way, I practice for the rest of our storied lives.

Chauna Craig is the author of the story collections The Widow’s Guide to Edible Mushrooms, winner of a Next Gen Indies award for short fiction, and Wings and Other Things, both published by Press 53. Her fiction has appeared most recently in the anthologies Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton) and Mountains Piled upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene (WVU Press), and her creative work has been recognized in the Pushcart Prize anthology and by Best American Essays and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She lives and teaches in Indiana, Pennsylvania.