Wholesale Fish Jewelry

Trips with my parents were always a special sort of excitement; we would pile into the family car (an overstatement; they would switch off turns in the front seat, caffeine and pastry powered drives exchanged for cramped and tired passenger-seat sleep, while I unwound my thin legs alone in the backseat) or squashing into the chairs of an helicopter like toothpaste perched on bristles, uncomfortable, clinging to each other and the thin armrests. It was like a beautiful lifetime event; we left pale and came back relaxed, pockets filled with wholesale jewelry.

We traveled to the Caribbean once, on a cruise ship like a skyscraper shoved over and still rolling from the momentum of the fall. It was a small child's dream home, floors like marbles and fireworks under damaged dim plastic, carpets printed with falls of printed ribbons fogged to loveliness by a baker's dozen pipes, enormous robots of scratched metal that dropped ice cream into sugar cones. I danced through the slatted halls, the twanging endless days and the slick silvery nights dripping like mercury across a dance floor. Ice cream slid between my teeth and the girls wore gowns shaped like horns and spoons. I watched them play games at midnight.

There was a market on the island, a party held down by wooden stakes and cash registers. I wrapped my hands around my mother's wrists and tracked her, twisted our way among the dazzle and the tangle, the quiet individual pockets. She discovered a set of earrings, wholesale jewelry, miniscule gold birdcages stuffed with swishing sparks of crystal. They hung from her ears with a serious gravity, baby planets, deep sea fish dangling lures. They gave her migranes from the light.

I envied her so badly that I pulled away from her new gravity to find my own wholesale jewelry. The girl was selling silver by the pound in shining slick heaps, waving it across her scale like a wizard with a fancy hat. Shining mazes tiptoed across my ears, silver fish wiggled about my wrist, stacking head to tail like children in line at the zoo, neat. I didn't have the money so I pried them away, stiff with disapproval, their scales snagging on the thin hairs on my arm. I've never been able to keep a fish alive since.