The Parable of Fishes

Last revised
July 10, 2020
Published
July 10, 2020
by
Tec Teagan

It is dark in South Carolina 
on the way back. There is a cross 
spearing the landscape, holy 
spire. Another in brown, in black, 
in white, red neon gloss sailing 
higher, bright between billboards 
and roadside shacks. 
The highway teems with questions 
my mother never asks—
dark fishes tossed to whitecaps.
I haul them up, hung on ghostly wire,
mouths gaping wide. I hunger 
for a taste, but fast
conspire to throw each star-pale
belly back. Drowned on air, silken
scales shimmer where they twist and
flap, I cannot bear the struggle, so I cut 
the taut line slack. Silver specters 
flicker, lost beneath the snaking river 
asphalt, dappled black,
swallowed by the rolling hills with
each fresh mile that we pass. I see 
a shadowed bow, a distant arc 
approaching fast, proud mast aspiring
to salvation. No, not a mast—a looming 
cross cleaves through the ebbing gray 
exhaust, in South Carolina,
the dark way back.