Fishwife's Floor

I should know better, I can't eat and then feel sad about it.  Living animals rendered into delicious dinner at my own hand rattles me and there lies the hypocrisy.   "I weep for you, " the Walrus said, "I deeply sympathize."  It was mussels.

I had a coupon for a dollar off from the seafood department at the grocer's; lobsters on ice waved feebly in hopes of homicide to put them out of their misery, others in the tank were livelier and higher priced.  If I ever kill a lobster again, it will happen only with vast amounts of alcohol saucing the cook-murderer.  The last one, with all the assurances of primitive nervous systems by instructive how-to's, fought back, at least I think it did.  I nipped the spinal cord, split the head in two, put it in a pail of vodka to make it drunk, yet when dunking it headfirst into the boiling mass, the poor, half-chopped up beast heard the calvary call and rallied, legs a-waving, trying to climb out of the pot. Lord, I cried.  Ate him, but cried through the butter.

But on a display made to look like a wooden dock were bags of mussels; now, I love shellfish but am often relegated to canned because I hate to kill them.  Canned this and thats are turned into food; smoked oysters, minced clams, scraped out of their shells and prepared by someone else.  Do you think a carrot screams when pulled from the soil?  Oh boy, maybe, thinks I.  There is a division of vegan that only consumes fruit, aptly named fruitarians, who work with the idea that fruit wants to be eaten since it is produced by the plant as a method of reproduction.  The apple, pear, peach or grape is given to us as part of a universe based on love that doesn't require destruction of the host plant or animal.  This appeals to me, yet I imagine a diet of only fruit and nuts would someday provoke a morning fight between me and the cats when the pop tab cracked open on the succulent salmon meow puree.  I'd spread it on nut flour toast, just for a bit of fish.

The part where I would be the one responsible for sizzling the blue-shelled mussels did occur to me in the store.  I thought, nahhh, grow up, you can do this, and the ocean salt they carried ignited the desire for fresh; I could smell the Atlantic as I drove home.  Everything is eaten by something else, I rationalized, usually in a brutal manner. How am I different?  One of the shells was partially open, so I tapped and it shut: someone was home and definitely alive.  Crap.

Scrubbing them was sad, spreading them in the baking dish and blanketing them with olive oil and butter bothered me.  What did they think was happening?  Could I put them in the freezer so they would go to sleep before I put them in the oven?  Since they don't have brains, do they have tenure at the university?  There is a sea squirt that swims till it finds a rock to cling to; once anchored, it no longer needs the ganglia associated with movement, so it then eats its own "brain" for nutrition.  What is the problem, sensitive human?

Recent science says that human development was brought back from extinction by groups living near the ocean, whose seafood diet was more stable than that of the inland carnivores who had to run and catch game.  Our large brain size is being debated as a possible result of the essential brain nutrients found in shellfish, a richer source than red meat.  Omega-three fatty acids and high protein gave the advantage, besides the less dangerous risk of gathering shellfish compared to skinning a sabertooth.  The idea of time may have been supported by watching the tides ebb and flow, giving the idea of when to gather clams would be best.  Middens, which are mounds of shells, are found in coastal areas around the world and are sometimes over nine meters deep.   Knowing this doesn't make buttering and baking them easier.

What did make it better was covering the dish with foil, putting their solemn blue shells out of sight and into the oven.  I left the kitchen so any hissing liquid noises or screaming would not be heard, and watched the clock.  After, lifting the foil released aromas of broth and butter, garlic and parsley, and there is now leftover mussel broth in the freezer for later soup.  They were delicious, the shells clattered and made a pile on newspaper, the cat played with one scuttering across the kitchen floor.  I scrubbed a few to keep as examples of bivalves for class, and tossed the rest into the garbage chute. Primitive thing in a shell, what have I turned into?

Supper is over, night has slipped into place.  Tulip is half on my lap, head resting on the arm of the sofa, and she is a furry hot water bottle warming me this cooler evening, before the apartment complex has turned on any heat.  Min is snoring behind us in her perch on the bookshelf, and there is broccoli soup cooling in the kitchen that needs to be put away.  Sleep well in your oyster beds, listen to the tides pulling and pushing as they did hundreds of thousands of years ago, when the months began by lunar and luteal signs of neap and ebb.  Covers up to chin, dream of coming and going.  Sleep well.