YOU TREAT ME LIKE A FISH AND OTHER PROBLEMS A written creative work submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of The Requirements for The Degree Master of Fine Arts In Creative Writing: Fiction by Evelyne Aikman San Francisco, California May 2018 Copyright by Evelyne Aikman 2018 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read You Treat Me Like a Fish and Other Problems by Evelyne Aikman, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a written creative work submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree: Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing: Fiction at San Francisco State University. Andrew Joron Assistant Professor of Creative Writing May-lee Chai Assistant Professor of Creative Writing YOU TREAT ME LIKE A FISH AND OTHER PROBLEMS Evelyne Aikman San Francisco, California 2018 A woman who has recently left a failed relationship returns home to her parents' farm to find her family in upheaval. As she attempts to wrestle with her own emotional strife and get her family in order she reflects on her life in a series of connected vignettes. Each of these humorous installments are told from this narrator's point of view. I certify that the Annotation is a correct representation of the content of this written creative work. f Chair, Written Creative Work Committee Date TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations ...................................................................................vi Sick Bag ................................................................................................ 1 Cabin Fever .......................................................................................... 18 Some Would Call This Limbo .....................................................................35 This Walk in the Woods ....... .................................................................... 38 The Mitten ............................................................................................50 Glove .................................................................................................. 63 Skunk Under the Porch .............................................................................66 You Treat Me Like A Fish ......... ................................................................79 Some Would Call This Limbo .....................................................................93 The Legion ...........................................................................................95 Cows Come Home ................................................................................. 11 0 Some Would Call This Limbo .. ................................................................. 123 Shed (The Legion Continued) ................................................................... 124 Return of the Prodigal So and So ................................................................ 138 Some Would Call This Limbo .................................................................... 151 Moving Day ...................................... .................................................. 152 To the Sea In Search OfHome .................................................................. 168 v LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Illustration 1 ........................................................................................... 7 Illustration 2 .......................................................................................... 34 Illustration 3 ..........................................................................................48 Illustration 4 .......................................................................................... 56 Illustration 5 .......................................................................................... 67 Illustration 6 .......................................................................................... 83 Illustration 7 .......................................................................................... 97 Illustration 8 ......................................................................................... 112 Illustration 9 ........................................................................................ 128 Illustration 10 .. ·.................................................................................... 144 Illustration 11. ...................................................................................... 161 Vl 1 Sick Bag The airport was inexplicable. Strangely quiet and oddly empty. I sat almost alone next to the gate, waiting for someone to say something, anything. It didn't have to be a boarding announcement, I could wait for that, I just wanted to hear a voice and have it sound like home, be comforting, have some kind of Maritime accent, or even just a Canadian one. I wanted the person who spoke to be wearing one of those stupid shirts that you could only get in Nova Scotia, or a hat with the logo of some crappy minor league hockey team whose players would never become professional, despite everyone in the town's best hopes. I wanted someone to call me dear or see someone else carrying a box of live lobster onto the plane. I wanted a doughnut, even though they tasted like shortening and sugar and something faintly chemically. I wanted it to feel the way it was supposed to feel going home instead of the way it actually felt. I wanted it to feel comforting instead of frightening, like something intentional instead of a panicked feint as I tried to figure out how and why I had blown up my life. I wanted it to be not wrong the way it was now, like going towards something instead of away from it. Like running to someone instead of running from you. You remember the airport, right? You were here with me once too. More than once, but I was thinking of the last time, before I started visiting my parents alone because you were too busy and I didn't mind because it was kind of nicer to go alone 2 anyway. It was just before we'd grown weary of each other, before we found each other's explanations boring. Before we asked ourselves: why? When we could still have conversations that didn't end in us punishing each other with guilt over our respective unhappinesses. During the brief period after I'd decided that it was ok for me to love you after all and before you'd realized it was too hard. I don't know how or why we built ourselves into such incompatible beings, or if we'd always been like that, if it was inevitable. We probably should have gone our separate ways a long time before that day, but instead we decided to be happy for a while, to have our respective lack and overabundance of enthusiasm- the former mine, the latter yours- for each other be enough, to board an airplane and be hurled through the sky together. Here we were, then, years ago, in a crowd of early morning travelers, shuffling obediently along the labyrinthine queue, looking with longing toward the point where we would finally be able to remove our shoes and present our ziplocked travel sized liquids for inspection, invisibly tied to one another. I'd felt that I could spend my whole life running away from you, or I could spend it running towards you, and the result would be the same. And it felt correct at the time, for you to be with my family, for us to be inextricable from one another. I liked the idea and possibility of our indivisibility. You'd nudged me out of my reverie, your warm hand against my shoulder, and I noticed that a gap had opened up before me, the line had advanced, and I had missed it. The crowd behind us grew restless. I could feel the weight of their discontent pushing against my back. It was similar to a strong gust on those days when the streets of the city 3 resembled wind tunnels. When running felt like walking and walking felt like no effort at all, but standing still was hard as soon as you noticed you were doing it. Everything had been fine back then until things got hard. The trip had been a success, you went fishing with my father, my mother taught you to drive the tractor. We got home and adopted a cat. But then later something between us moved and changed. Or maybe the things around us moved and changed and we stayed still like I had in the airport. Moved away from or back to what had previously surrounded us. The move had been wrong, but somehow we couldn't stop it, or maybe we hadn't tried. Maybe we didn't notice that the apartment started to feel thick, each moment in it thicker than the moment before, like the air had become an invisible liquid. Or maybe like the whole place had been strung all over with ropes around which it was almost impossible to maneuver. The opaque, condensed atmosphere created in me an intense desire to flee, but it also kept me from moving. So I stayed in the chair by the window or on the sofa in front of the tv or maybe even in the bed. I thought about outside sometimes but then it felt as though the liquid and the ropes had migrated there as well. Or that they had always been there, and only a tiny portion of their unbearable mass and weight had seeped into our apartment. Yes, that was it, and if I went outside it would be worse. The outside around us not like other outsides, I thought. It wasn't correct. Not only because of the weight, but because of the dry rotten smell, the dirty sidewalks where there wasn't room for a single person more. 4 So I only went out when I had to, to whatever job I had- first waitressing and bartending, then an art gallery, then in a flower shop, then at a skin care company, then a non-profit-