Saltless
BY ANNIE ZHU
The malecón was louder then– the tricycle bells, vendors screeching prices, kids slapping marbles into sidewalk grooves. There was always someone yelling. Always something frying.
Before the black tide came, Mami and I ate homemade ceviche by the malecón with lime on our fingers and chicha morada in our throats. We’d sit on overturned buckets or the lip of the curb, elbows pressed together, plastic forks stabbing into bits of corvina that smelled like sea. Lime juice would dribble down my knuckles into fresh cuts, and Mami would laugh when I flinched, blowing them gently like I was still a baby. She always ate the red onion slices last and said they were best soaked in lime and salt.
My father would hum boleros from a rusted speaker while gutting fish with a pocketknife. The silver skins drifted into his bright blue bucket, and when the light hit just right, became wet confetti.
“No hay más que hacer, mijita,” he’d say, “the sea is tired.” He always said it with a wink, like the ocean was a drunk friend who needed a nap. Then he’d press a hand to my head, rough with brine and callus, and turn back to the fish in his hands, their slick bodies slipping between his fingers like they were trying to swim away.
I’d squat behind our stall, the splintered cement warming our dirty feet. The air, fat with yuca and diesel fumes, cracked out faint tunes of Pedro Infante and Los Kipus. Mami would pour chicha morada into our soda bottles, its deep purple staining her fingertips like ink. Mami said it tasted better when your hands weren’t clean. I liked watching the lime juice hiss over the raw fish, the way the red onions curled like ribbon in the marinade. I’d stick my fingers in the mix when she wasn’t looking and suck them clean.
“Mira tú,” she’d scold, her lips forcing down a smile, “you’ll ruin the batch.” But she never stopped me.
But the sizzling eventually tapered off. It happened before the sun rose, behind the rocks – rows of fish like upturned mouths, eyes melted shut. Their scales had peeled off, revealing pink-bellied flesh. The rhythm of the tide bubbled lard beneath us, and I remember dipping a toe in and pulling it back, bleeding soot. My father crouched at the shore, his net limp in his hands.
*
I used to have friends. We’d race bottlecaps along the cracked gutter after school, chasing them with sticks and bare feet until the calluses on our heels peeled like old bark. The winner got first pick from Tía Roselita’s basket of chifles, though we all knew she’d pretend not to see and give us each a handful anyway. Her stall was a patchwork of blue tarp and milk crates, tied with laundry string and botched with plastic bags from the mercado. The smell of ají and cilantro clung to the posts, even on the days she had nothing but lentils and a borrowed radio.
We’d stack rocks into crooked pyramids along the edge of the malecón and call them offerings: para el mar, para los peces, para que vuelvan. We never said it aloud, but we all wanted the sea to like us.
Most of them—Lucía, Kevin, Dani—were the children of fishermen too. Their fathers carried permits in wallets, cards laminated and weathered but still real. Didn’t notice how their fathers filled out forms at the co-op, how they signed their names with pens instead of calluses.
Once, I painted seashells with pink nail polish I’d stolen from Mami’s drawer. Hearts, stars, little sunbursts with too many rays—and tried to sell them to tourists who stepped off the little buses in wide hats and loud shirts. One woman with red lipstick stopped and held a shell between two fingers like it might stain her. She smiled, said “Qué linda,” and gave me two soles.
I ran home like I’d won the lottery. My legs were sore and my hands smelled like polish remover, but I didn’t stop running until I made it to the doorway. Mami laughed when I showed her the coins, wiped her hands on her apron, and told me we were going to the fryer.
She bought me yuquitas dipped in ají, their skins browned and bubbling, their centers melting of sweet starch. I burned my tongue on the first one. She let me sip her maracuyá juice to cool it down. Then she said maybe I’d own a shop one day, una tiendita en el centro, with a little bell on the door and shelves lined with jars of candy and cinnamon soap. I’d need to learn to count change fast, she said, and smile with all my teeth.
But fishing doesn’t give soles anymore. So Lucía doesn’t come to the malecón. Dani moved in with his uncle in Piura. Kevin’s mom posted a picture of him online in a clean American school uniform, all tucked in, all smiles. I saw it once on Tía Roselita’s cracked phone, then never again.
*
The day the journalists came, we’d just finished boiling rice. Papi was shirtless, salt still crusted in the folds of his neck. I watched through the curtains as cameras blinked lividly. Someone shouted “¡Aquí! Aquí vive un pescador artesanal!”
He froze. His hands trembled just enough for the spoon to slip into the pot. When they pushed open our door and took in the sagging walls, their noses stretched wildly from the stench of beggary. I thought they’d ask about the spill. About how the black slicked the shore of film. But instead, they asked for papers. A license. A number. Anything to prove that Papi was who he said he was.
Papi didn’t answer. He only held out the faded card with his name smudged off the corners.
One reporter laughed.
“Eso no vale nada. That’s worth nothing.”
That night I walked along the shore alone, the sky the color of old bruises, unsure if it wanted to be night or just give up trying. My sandals split at the heel, one strap stitched back with fishing line, the other flapping like a loose tongue. My skirt clung damp around my knees, and my shirt pinched at the armpits, faded to the color of rusted mango skin. The air smelled sharp and wrong, like metal boiled in milk. All around me, the beach lay littered with things the sea coughed up and forgot: plastic bottles, bits of rope, a fish skeleton fanned out like an x-ray of wings, and the oozing slime. That’s when I saw it, tucked in the dark.
Its wings were stretched unevenly, one folded in tight, the other splayed wide and stiff, like a broken fan left out in the sun. The feathers were clumped with oil, thick, tar-colored tendrils gluing them together at strange angles. Its body twitched once, and its beak opened just barely, enough for me to see the soft, pale tongue inside. I picked it up with the hem of my skirt, careful not to press too hard. It was heavier than I expected. Still warm.
“Aguanta, chiquita,” I whispered. “Aguanta.”
At home, I filled a plastic bucket with water from the spigot. The water came out in spurts, muddy at first, then clear. I added a capful of Mami’s lavender dish soap and stirred it with my hand until bubbles formed. The gull blinked slowly as I dipped its wings, one at a time, into the bucket. I used an old toothbrush to try and clean between the feathers. The oil came off in greasy swirls that clung to the surface of the water like fused plastic. The bird pecked once at the edge of the bucket, half-heartedly, like it remembered what fighting was supposed to feel like. I pulled the bucket under my cot, draped in mildew yellow.
In the morning, I found the gull curled up into the bucket’s corner, one wing tucked beneath its body, the other still agape like it might try again. A fly frolicked around its beak. I crouched beside it and stared for a long time.
Papi didn’t say anything. He stepped over the bird, paused, and touched the top of my head with his palm, gently, once. The way you press down on a pot lid to keep it from rattling.
*
Some evenings I sit with Tía Roselita at her stall. The canopy still flails like it has something to say, though no one buys fish anymore. She lets me sip warm chicha and peels mandarinas with her thumbs.
“¿Y tu padre?” she asked once.
“He’s still looking,” I said.
“For fish or your mami?”
“For anything.”
She clucked her tongue. “The sea takes and takes, mijita. Be careful it doesn’t take you too.”
*
I asked Papi once if he thought Mami would ever come back.
“She left during high tide,” he had said. “That’s not a good sign.”
I found the note that day tucked behind the spice tins. The ones Mami used to rattle like maracas when she sang and cooked at the same time—paprika, cumin, achiote dust still stubborn on the lids. It was the spot she used to keep her wedding ring when she helped clean fish, said she didn’t want to gut something while wearing gold.
The paper was folded in half, lined, torn from one of my old school notebooks. The top corner still had my doodles on it, little potas swimming around a sun with too many rays. Inside, the writing was slanted and uneven, like she wrote it in a hurry, or maybe with her hands shaking.
“Para mi Lucerito,” it began. My little light.
I only read the first few lines. Just enough to understand. That she couldn’t take it anymore. That the stall was bleeding more than it earned. That fish didn’t feed us if there were no fish. That with Papi’s nets bare and no documents to claim the loss, she had become a mouth too big to keep.
I crushed the paper in my fist before I even realized what I was doing.
I didn’t cry. I walked to the doorway and hurled it into the yard, hard enough that the wind stuttered to grab hold. The paper spun once, twice, sailing over the fence and vanishing into the brush behind the house. The weeds there were wild and overgrown, not sugargrass but something tougher, sharp-edged and burnt at the tips. The kind of stuff that cut your ankles and left behind a sweet, moldy scent when you snapped a stalk in half. We used to call it ghost grass, because it whistled when the wind passed through it, like someone trying to hum without lips.
Papi didn’t ask what I’d found. He was mending netting on the porch, pulling the same knot again and again.
Around midnight I slipped out with a flashlight and combed the yard in silence. The wind tasted sour and thick, the way it does before a bad rain, like the sky was chewing on something. The grass wheezed beneath my feet, bending and straightening like it had just stood up from kneeling. I checked under the old crates, between the fencing slats, even inside the rusted cooking pot we used to keep basil in.
It was gone. Mami too. And the salt hadn’t come back, either.
*
I started keeping the dilapidated nets even after they stank of dense rot. Of blisters and things that used to breathe. I laid them out behind the house, where altamisa grew arched and angry.
“Are you trying to catch ghosts?” Papi asked, half-smiling.
I didn’t answer him. Just kept unwinding the net like it still remembered the shape of a fish. Like if I ran my hands along the holes slowly enough, I could patch something bigger than thread. The net snagged against a nail, and I winced before the wire cut me– just a scrape, but enough to sting.
Sometimes I’d sit out there after dark, watching the wind try to move it, like maybe the sea would come looking and get confused. Like maybe it would think we were still worth feeding. Papi never stopped me. He just stepped over the net every morning like it wasn’t there.
*
Last night, I dreamed. Not a big dream, not the kind with flying or falling, but just one of those quiet, sticky ones that feel more like memory than sleep.
We were back at the malecón. No cameras. No shouting. Just breeze.
Tía Roselita waved from her stall, steam rising from a pot of chupe de camarones. Papi sat under an umbrella, stripping mangoes. Mami walked toward us, her red sandal tapping the cobblestones. In her hand was a single peach.
She held it out to me. “For later,” she said. “When the sea gets hungry again.”
A sound of rain pounded the roof, oozing past the fissures. Papi was already on the coast, staring at the water pooling in our broken boat. He didn’t say anything. Just stared.
I picked up one of the nets, still tangled. I held it up to the sky, letting the rain tickle through it.
It smelled like salt again.
Not oil.
Just salt.
