The Fish Dock at Five Thirty

The fish dock starts before the light does. By the time I park, the women who sell are already squatting in rows with their basins, and the ice is melting into the dust. I carry two buckets and no list. Whatever is good that morning decides the menu, not the other way around.

I do not buy from the first basin I see. I walk the length of the dock, look at eyes and gills, press a thumb near the tail. By now the sellers know me and stop shouting their prices; they let me look. That silence is a small professional courtesy, and I try to deserve it by paying honestly and quickly.

A fish tells you its age before it tells you its price.

The mullet are good this morning, small and silver, and there is a tray of horse mackerel that has been on ice since midnight, acceptable but not excellent. I take both. I also take a bag of small shrimp that anyone with money would ignore, because they will make a broth that tastes like the bottom of the sea.

The Return Trip

The road back is slower than the road out. The city fills as it wakes: a truck unloading gas bottles, a boy selling phone credit, a woman carrying a mattress on her head. I drive with one hand and keep the buckets upright with the other, and I do not swear at anyone, because it changes nothing and spoils the morning.

At six thirty the shutters are still down and I am alone with the knives. Scaling outside on the step, gutting at the table, the radio low. This is the hour I like best: nothing is decided yet, and everything is still possible in the ordinary way that cooking allows.

The pot can take its time. The morning cannot.

My mother would have kept the fish whole and grilled it, and she would have said I use too much palm oil. She is probably right. But the customers want the stew and the funge, and they want it at noon, and they want me smiling when it comes out. That is the whole trade, really: the slow thing served quickly, by someone glad to see you.

By nine the pots are on, the first bread is out of the oven, and the boy who washes dishes is singing something he knows one line of. The dock already feels like something that happened to another person in another city, and I have to remind myself that I was there, and that I chose well.