Catfish

Allison A. deFreese

And in one life I came back as the cake at a catfish wedding. It was deep August in the muddy bottom where the Missouri nibbled a piece of Kansas at the Kaw. 

Blues and channel cats longer than bridal trains were swimming both sides of the current. The flower girls were bullheads with freckles. Their bouquets were snags strung with veils. The pastor was a six-foot flathead. He wore hooks in his whiskers, as if piercings, and had been around long enough to have snapped a few lines. He ate the little ring bearer at once, along with the rings. They were, after all, both only ceremonial and guests kept leaving anyway to spawn in a tributary.

The buffet smelled like rancid liver. And I was prettier than I had ever been. I was trussed up and proper, a petticoat in three layers, my soul external like a crayfish shell. A painted lady trimmed in buttercream, my icing once white began rising in bubbles before anyone opened the bubbly. My flour from so many wheat sprigs came unraveled next. I was a mass again, indistinguishable from drops of rain in the river, from a tear landing on the sandy bank or a sneeze that can never be called back midair, a few last words, a life vest, a pledge. 

By the time they said their vows, I had dissolved already into a waxy film. Slowly I drifted upward before settling in the flotsam, like a slick of boat fuel on the surface. I was a horizontal rainbow in the late afternoon light, then finally invisible. Silently I sailed on toward another sunset.

A 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Allison A. deFreese is based in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Her work appears in: Crazyhorse, Harvard Review, Hunger Mountain, Indiana Review, New England Review, New York Quarterly, Permafrost, and Quick Fiction.