I called him Bubby Bubbles, since he blew bubbles all day, and when I leaned over his tank, I could hear him crunching on the fish food Leonie had brought home in a sample-size bag. The fish was green, the color of pine needles, and he had stripes down his tail the color of red mud. When she came back, her skin was dry and flaking at the corners of her mouth, her hair stuck out in a bushy halo, and she smelled like wet hay. I hadn't seen her since Friday, since she told Mam she was going to the store to buy some milk and some sugar and didn't come back. She came home with one on a Sunday, after she'd been out all weekend. “She bought me betta fish when I was six, after I kept telling her the same story, every day, about the tanks we had in my class at school, the betta fish, red and purple and blue and green, swimming lazily in the tanks, flashing brilliant and then dull. My mama and daddy and they mamas and daddies.' Mam looks to the wall, closes her eyes. 'Because we don't walk no straight lines. Your uncle Given, my mama and daddy, Pop's mama and daddy.' The old folks always told me that when someone dies in a bad way, sometimes it's so awful even God can't bear to watch, and then half your spirit stays behind and wanders, wanting peace the way a thirsty man seeks water.' She frowns: two fishhooks dimpling down.
I think that only happens when the dying's bad. Even though I feel like speaking's bringing her leaving closer. 'But you won't be no ghost, huh, Mam?' I have to ask even though I know the telling hurts her. 'It's like walking through a door, Jojo.' Couldn't take seeing Pop walk around her without touching her cheek, without bending to kiss her on her neck. Couldn't take her sitting in the kitchen, invisible. Didn't nothing come close to easing it until you came along.” Drove me blind, made me so crazy I couldn't speak. When Given died, I thought I'd drown in it. Smelled it when I made it home in the middle of the night, smelled it over the sour smell of the bayou and the salt smell of the sea, smelled it years later when I climbed into bed with Philomene, put my nose in your grandmother's neck, and breathed her in like the scent of her could wash the other away. Smelled it when I finally found his mama after weeks of searching, just so I could tell her Richie was dead and she could look at me with a stone face and shut the door on me. Smelled it the day they let me out on account I'd led the dog that caught and killed Richie. Smelled it when the warden told me I'd done good. They'd torn his throat out, hamstringed him. Smelled it when the warden and sergeant cam up on us, the dogs yipping and licking blood from they muzzles.
Hold my hands up to my face, I can smell it under my skin.
But that damn blood ain't never come out.
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