My all-you-can-eat sushi bitches
by Corrinne Bollendorf
Image by Sitorapicture for Pexels
Today is lunch with the aunt-mothers. I am not sure if this is only a Reno thing, but every sushi joint in town is all-you-can-eat. It’s a good deal if you can handle weirdly thick cuts of salmon Nigiri sliced by casino chefs with hands too hurried or hungover to care. Where they get you is the rice. Try to fill you full of fat rolls overstuffed with cream cheese and shrimp tempura until your belly balloons. Aunt-mothers don’t care though, they crave sea salt and dairy and soy sauce.
The ancestral blood of my matriarchs runs high with sodium. Too much salt in the blood makes us restless; our mouths dry. I—they, lust after moisture inside the mouth. Sweet, buttery Hamachi skin that melts away the memory of our fathers. Men who horded fishing tackle and nets with handles chewed raw by rats. Men who fished for rainbow trout in the Sierras, locked themselves away in garages with refrigerators full of Bud—stepfathers who looked at us daughters, like crazed steers, unable to fathom the bonds of our sacred, holy worship of Sashimi boats and juicy salmon roe pearls.
At lunch we examine each orangey orb—their colors angry as the eyes of the longhorn men we left behind, or thought we did. We spear them with chopsticks, pop the gooey eyeballs into our mouths. Swirl their delicate membranes over teeth. Imagine what their screams might sound like muffled underneath our hungry tongues.
One of the aunts is visiting from South Dakota, Bambi. Named after a famous ballerina, not the stupid baby deer. She ran away from California to marry a cowboy. “That's what happens to hippies who get pregnant,” one aunt-mother says. Trade their flower crowns for spurs and lay under men who refuse to eat fish. Her cowboy never had Sashimi in his life, or a burrito, or an arugula salad. She suffers from terrible night terrors, wails and kicks in her sleep because her kidneys swell from not enough sea and too much ingested prairie dust, cow shit.
Aunt Shelly is the one who is currently terminal. She’s never had a mammogram and is afraid of the doctor. I asked her if she would ever dare eat Ikezukuri squid—prepared still alive so it squirms and writhes around your molars. She throws back a shot of free, water-downed Saki, “Sure, I’ll try anything once—you think I’d have to tongue wrestle it?” She wears a bulky sweater to hide the concave of her diseased chest, but bravery alone cannot will the body to comply. Just ask a pufferfish inside the jaws of a shark.
When she's not around, the other aunt-mothers talk about how they think she secretly married her boyfriend and didn't tell anyone. Why? Because secrets are currency in this household. I do not think she lies for malicious reasons, just wants to protect the daughters—says, everything is okay, in her high-pitched baby voice, buys them socks with embroidered pugs, treats them to forehead Botox. I’d like to think the truth is irrelevant when you are dying—like the rising mercury levels in albacore or the poison carried on the black spines of sea urchins.
They used to call Aunt Beth, the devil do-ya. You have to watch out for her, like an eel she comes out of nowhere. Unagi. People are surprised by her bite, many underestimate it— think her stupid because she's so damn bad at driving. Her cancer was not terminal.
When I look at old pictures of Beth with thick, black hair and an all-knowing smirk, I fear for anyone who crosses her. She does not like to keep her doors unlocked. A bottom feeder rarely ventures to the surface, preferring the abyssal zone where all the things of nightmares live, like the hagfish. An ancient alien, snake-like creation with a jawless hole for a mouth lined with fangs that strip fish carcasses to bone. There was a time when Aunt Beth's bedroom door was always locked. Up all night tweaking with her boyfriend. The boyfriend, that one, who liked to put his hand on the lap of a nine-year-old. Same old tired-ass story as dry and cliché as a California roll. Some women will do anything to feel the wet on skin again. Sell their children for fresh fish. Ripe avocados.
And finally, my mother. Teresa. Who is sick with the same cancer now too, orders the Hawaiian Roll with imitation crab, crystal shrimp, pineapple, and charred salmon. I ask the aunt-mothers why we crave the things that hurt us most? My mother looks around the table with a, here she goes again, face.
“Are you high?” she asks, half-serious.
I say, “No—but don’t you think we’ve all eaten way too much mercury in our lifetime?” I look down at my mutilated spicy shrimp Nigiri, a murder scene. I imagine the microplastics inside each slice pulsing. “Aren’t you guys scared?”
The aunt-mothers roll their eyes. My mother chuckles and chokes a bit on rice. In this moment they are shoulder to shoulder, hunched around the table, their matter absorbs into one giant blobfish.
“We already got cancer,” my mother says pointing to the other aunt-mothers still in blobfish mode, who nod with a fat slimy head. “What’s a little more before we hit the road, huh?” she winks, and swims away before I can kiss her goodbye.
Corrinne Bollendorf (she/her/hers) is a writer based in northern Nevada and serves as fiction editor for the Sierra Nevada Review. She is a graduate of the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe’s MFA, where she received the Two Pines Award for Outstanding Creative Work. She writes about generational trauma, identity, and violence.
Visit Corrinne’s website