[Fiction] The Hold by Raymond Brunell

The Hold

by Raymond Brunell

They told me I was killing myself, and they could have been right. My body kept its own accounts then—ribs showing through my nightgown, spine like rosary beads beneath the fabric. I was ten years old, and I weighed fifty-three pounds, and I had not eaten anything that once swam for eight months, two weeks, and four days.

My mother believed it was stubbornness. My father believed it was a sickness of the mind. Neither of them believed it was my body's wisdom, rejecting complicity in what their hands had wrought.

I did not tell them this. Certain truths, when spoken, sound like madness.

The sound began last winter, though it seems to me now it was always there, waiting for me to become still enough to hear it. It came at night—a crystalline note threading through my dreams, beautiful as wind through bottle glass. Terrible as a distant child's scream. I woke with my heart hammering and my hands pressed over my ears, but the sound was not coming from outside. It was coming from downstairs, from the chest freezer in the mudroom where my parents store the catch before the morning run to the market.

I crept down in bare feet, the floorboards cold as bone. The freezer hummed its mechanical drone, but beneath it, woven through it, was the other sound—voices singing in harmony, each voice a different pitch, a different timbre of loss. Glass bells ringing underwater. A frequency that bypassed my ears and resonated in my teeth, my sternum, and the ossicles of my inner ear.

I lifted the freezer lid.

Cod and haddock and mackerel lay frozen in their rows, glassy eyes reflecting the mudroom's single bulb. And they were singing. Not with mouths—their mouths froze open in permanent gasps—but they sang nonetheless. I could distinguish each voice: the cod's deep threnody, the mackerel's silver treble, the haddock's middle register carrying the melody. They sang of the net's unexpected darkness, bodies colliding, gills struggling to function in air. They sang of the deck and the knife and what it means to watch your own death prepared with casual efficiency.

I closed the lid. I have not eaten fish since then.

My mother tried reasoning first. Fish is brain food, she said. Omega-3 fatty acids. Protein. She prepared my favorite meals—her beer-battered haddock, her cod baked with lemon and dill. I sat before each plate and felt my throat close, my stomach clench. The smell alone was unbearable: not the smell of cooking fish, but something underneath it, a scent like copper, salt, and fear.

"Neve, please," she would say, and her voice carried a desperation that frightened me. "One bite."

But I could hear them singing even from the plate. Fainter, diminished by death and cooking—but still singing. Still testifying. And I could not make myself an accomplice to silence.

My father tried discipline. Sent me to my room without supper. They told me I would eat what they served or eat nothing at all. I ate nothing at all. He grew angry, then bewildered, then something worse—afraid. I saw it in how he looked at me across the dinner table, as if I were becoming translucent, something he could see through to the wall behind.

They took me to Dr. Morrison, who checked my weight and blood pressure and asked gentle questions about school, friends, and whether I worried about anything. I told him I didn't care for fish. He suggested it might be a texture issue, a phase, and recommended they not force it, offer alternatives, and give me time.

But there was no time. I was vanishing by increments.

I ate bread and butter. I ate potatoes and carrots and turnips—things that grew in the earth, that had never known the ocean's weight. I ate apples from the mainland, their flesh crisp and innocent of brine. My body accepted these offerings with reluctant grace, converting them into enough energy to continue refusing.

By spring, my clothes hung on me like sails on a windless day. My mother took to watching me with desperate inventory in her eyes, counting ribs and measuring the prominence of clavicle and wrist bones. My father stopped looking at me face-to-face. He would address his words to the space above my head, as if I were already becoming a ghost.

The singing grew clearer as I grew thinner. I began to hear it not from the freezer but from the boat when it returned to harbor, from the fish market downtown, from the restaurant where the tourists ate their scenic dinners. That glassy grief permeated the whole town. I walked through a world that sang forever of death and called it livelihood, called it tradition, called it the way things were.

And then one night I woke to a new voice in the chorus.

It was deeper than the others, rougher, and without a doubt, human. It sang beneath the fish songs like a foundation, like the bass note that gives all the others meaning. I knew it immediately, though I had never heard it before—knew it the way you know your own name when someone calls it in the dark.

My grandfather's voice. Callum. Dead twenty years before I was born, lost in a storm that had become family legend. Washed overboard, they said. Never found. The ocean took him back, my father would say when he'd had too much to drink, as if it were poetic.

But Callum's song was not poetic. It was the song of a man who drowned knowing he would drown, who had time to understand that the water filling his lungs was the same water that had fed him all his life. Betrayal—not the ocean's betrayal, but his own, some sin or debt left unpaid, some crime against the element that sustained him.

And he was not singing from the ocean. He was singing from the boat.

I began to have nightmares about the hold—that empty space below deck where we store the catch before processing, where my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him sorted their harvest. In the dreams, I would stand in that space and hear all the voices at once: fish and humans mingled, a cacophony of the taken and the taking. And always, loudest in the corner where the shadows pooled, Callum's voice, singing my father's name like a question.

I grew worse. Dr. Morrison referred us to a specialist in the city—a psychologist who spoke to me about anxiety and control and the ways grief manifests in families. She suggested I could be expressing, through my body's refusal, some unprocessed trauma inherited from my father's loss of his own father. She recommended exposure therapy. Gradual reintroduction to the feared stimulus in a controlled environment.

My parents seized on this with a drowning man's grip. Yes. Exposure. Show her there is nothing to fear.

They planned it with great care, as if planning a surgery. They would take me to the boat at dawn, before the day's fishing began. Let me see the hold empty and clean. Let me understand that it is only a space, only wood and water, nothing more.

I weighed forty-seven pounds on the morning they woke me before light. My mother had laid out warm clothes and had prepared a thermos of tea with honey. My father's hands shook as he helped me into my coat—whether from the cold or dread, I could not say.

The harbor was dark, boats rocking at their moorings like drowsing horses. Our boat—the Leonora, named for my mother—sat low in the water, patient. The smell of salt, diesel, and fish guts permeated everything. The chorus rose to meet me, a thousand voices singing in the darkness.

My father lifted me aboard. I weighed so little by then that it required no effort. My mother followed, carrying blankets, as if warmth would be the cure.

"We're going to go below," my father said, his voice carrying that false brightness adults use when trying to convince children of safety. "For a minute. So you can see."

He opened the hold and climbed down the ladder. My mother guided me after him, her hands on my waist to steady my descent. The smell rose up—fish and blood and something older. The singing intensified until I thought my skull would crack.

The hold was empty. Morning light slanted through the deck boards above, striping the walls in shadow. The walls curved around us like ribs. Blood and scales still marked the boards despite yesterday's hosing. And in the corner, where the shadows pooled deepest, where the hull met the keel in a joint worn smooth by decades—there the singing was loudest.

"You see?" my mother said. "There's nothing here. A simple boat. Wood and water; that's all."

She was wrong; there was everything here.

I walked to the corner on legs that couldn't quite hold even my diminished weight. I placed my palm flat against the boards where the stain was darkest. The wood was cold and damp, and beneath my hand I could feel it—a vibration, a resonance, as if the boat itself had become an instrument strung with voices.

"Neve?" my father said.

I turned to look at him. In the dim hold, his face looked gray, ghostlike. Behind him, my mother clutched her blankets like a shield.

"This is where he died," I said.

singing stopped.

In the sudden silence, I could hear only the slap of waves against the hull, the creak of the boat at its mooring, and my own heartbeat, thin and fast in my chest.

"What?" my father whispered.

"Grandfather Callum. This is where he died. Not overboard. Here. In this corner." The words came from somewhere beyond hunger, beyond exhaustion. "The storm hit and the boat rolled, crushing him here against the hull." The catch shifted. Hundreds of pounds of fish, ice, and water slid at once, and he found himself caught in the corner with nowhere to go. It took him three hours to die. Long enough to know he was dying. Long enough to call for help that couldn't hear him over the storm."

My father had gone white. "How do you—Neve, that's not—"

"You found him here. After. You were nineteen. You came down to check the hold after the storm passed, and you found him. But you told everyone he went overboard because that seemed cleaner, seemed like the ocean's will rather than negligence, seemed like a death that didn't require anyone to feel responsible." I looked at him and could see it was true, I could see it written in every line of his face. "And you didn't clean it right. You hosed the boards and you repaired the catch restraints and you said the right prayers, but you never made it right. You never told the truth. And so he stayed here, in the corner, singing. And every fish that has died in this hold since has learned his song."

My mother made a small sound, something between a sob and a denial.

"You built your livelihood on top of his death," I continued, and my voice was not my voice anymore but something speaking through me, something that needed a witness.

"Four generations of fishing these waters, and the only rule was to tell the truth about how a man dies. The sea demands that much. But you wanted to protect something—your father's reputation, your own inheritance; I don't know. And so the debt stayed unpaid."

My father dropped to his knees on the bloody boards. His hands covered his face. His shoulders shook.

"I'm sorry," he said into his palms. "God help me, I'm sorry. I was a boy. I was afraid. I thought if they knew I hadn't secured the catch by the book, if they knew it was my mistake that killed him—" He broke off, weeping now, decades of silence breaching at last.

My mother went to him, wrapped herself around him, the blankets falling forgotten.

I stood in the corner where my grandfather died and felt the singing drain away like water from a broken vessel. The voices remained—they would always be there, the chorus of the taken—but Callum's voice faded, dissolving into whatever comes after someone has given and received testimony.

I felt something in me shift, some frozen core beginning to thaw. The revulsion that had gripped my throat for eight months loosened by a degree. Not gone—never wholly gone—but changed. My body knew what it needed to do and starved itself to become the instrument of necessary confession. It had turned me into a tuning fork, resonating at the frequency of unpaid debts, unable to rest until I spoke the truth.

We sat together in the hold as the sun rose, my father weeping, my mother holding him, and I in the corner where death had pooled and festered, feeling the singing quiet to a whisper, then to silence, then to something almost like peace.

They sold the boat three weeks later. My father found work at the cannery—processing, not catching, a distinction that mattered to him if to no one else. My mother took a job at the library. We moved inland fifteen miles. Far enough that the harbor's smell no longer reached us, far enough that the chorus faded to background noise I could almost ignore.

I eat fish now. Rarely, and never cod, never from these waters, but I eat it. My body accepts it as penance, as participation in the world's necessary cruelties. At twelve, I weigh seventy-one pounds and am growing stronger every day.

But I still hear them singing. In every fish market, every seaside restaurant, and every freezer case in every grocery store. The ocean's grief is a frequency we are not meant to outgrow, only to learn to bear. And I bear it. I bear witness. Because someone must.

Because we owe the dead at least that much: to hear them. Their voices ring in the hollows we've carved by refusing to speak the truth about what we take, what it costs, and what debts we pass to our children—debts paid in the currency of their diminishing bodies.

I bear it. And in bearing it, I endure.

Author Bio: Raymond Brunell is an MFA Creative Writing student whose speculative fiction explores consciousness, transformation, and the physics of loss. His work has appeared in over twenty literary magazines, including Skeleton Flowers Press, Brilliant Flash Fiction, The Drift, Across the Margin, Literary Garage, and Moss Puppy Magazine. He lives in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. More at www.unbound-atlas.com