Bryr - Exercise #4

I can’t help it today, can’t be gentle today, got no patience today. The throb is something in my joints now, still there after clamping each hand in an armpit for five minutes, impossible to drive out. It’s the first joints that are the worst, just the tips, stiff and clumsy now. No gloves allowed. The work’s too delicate. Candy, posted on the other side of the tank, folded hanky knotted like a tourniquet around her temples, smoked at break with shaky fingers and never seems to need to warm her blanched and splotchy hands. But when she takes up one of the tiny salmon fry, slipping her fingers around it as if her hand were a long beak, scooping it gently from the water, her hands never shake. I hate her calm, her care. Hour after hour of it, never clenching her teeth, never snatching one with a fist, snipping off the fin, maybe more, and shoving its tiny head over the spike that drives the miniscule marking tag into its skull and tossing it, stunned and listing, into the other tank. Today she whistles and I envy her slack shoulders, her loose hips as she clips through the motions, efficient, tender. But she’s noticed me now. I catch her watching me, the tension leaking out in tiny bursts between and at the edges of movements. The little fish, smaller than a pinky, don’t’ deserve it, don’t deserve it at all. Candy watches me – she must be counting how many I kill, how many float to the surface a few moments after I toss them in. I hate her for watching but try to slow down, to be careful, to bend the aching joints and perform the procedure with humanity. But all dexterity is lost.