Lungfish: A Novel

by Meghan Gilliss

Genres: Small Town & Rural

Synopsis

Longlisted for The Center for Fiction 2022 First Novel Prize

"Lungfish is a force of nature—a deeply felt marvel of a book that navigates grief, parenthood, and the mysteries of family with unrelenting power and precision. Here is a story about the islands we build and carry with us. Here is storytelling at its best." —Paul Yoon, author of Snow Hunters and Run Me to Earth

Tuck is slow to understand the circumstances that have driven her family to an uninhabited island off the coast of Maine, the former home of her deceased grandmother where she once spent her childhood summers. Squatting there now, she must care for her spirited young daughter and scrape together enough money to leave before winter arrives—or before they are found out.

Relying on the island for sustenance and answers—bladderwrack, rosehips, tenacious little green crabs; smells held by the damp walls of the house, field guides and religious texts, a failed invention left behind by her missing father—Tuck lives moment-by-moment through the absurdity, beauty, paranoia, and hunger that shoots through her life, as her husband struggles to detox.

Exquisitely written and formally daring, Lungfish tells the story of a woman grappling through the lies she has been told—and those she has told herself—to arrive at the truth of who she is and where she must go. Meghan Gilliss’s debut is a brilliant and heartbreaking novel about addiction, doubt, marriage, motherhood, and learning to see in the dark.

 

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Release date: September 13, 2022

Publisher: Catapult

Print pages: 320

Sample

HERE

My body is still and flat beneath the heavy quilts—the smell of them part mothball, part cedar, part mildew, part beach rose, part my grandmother. I’m still not used to sleeping in this bed where she died, beneath her stained glass window—the blues and yellows and reds that form a cross, encircled in the Celtic way. In this bed on this island where no one else lives. In this house halfway out to sea. In this Gulf of Maine. On this island shaped like a shepherd’s crook, where pine needles stuck to my feet with sap when I was a child, on the short visits that made each summer a thing that belonged to me.

I try again to imagine having religion. I try again to imagine having religion, and having it watch over my bed—where, presumably, things happen. I imagine having religion and a husband I’m in the habit of touching. I imagine another way of living. But it’s a lot to sustain, and it’s early, and there’s no hope of coffee.

Paul hasn’t slept, I’m sure. He paces, or sits with his elbows on his knees and his fists clasped in his hair, and rocks, and trembles. His sweat—a sick slickness that covers the surface of him—carries the smell. Brings it out of his body, like the damp sea air brought it out of the walls.

I do panic a little, knowing he’s just outside the door.

I could make myself get up if there was a guarantee that everything else would stay the same. But the sun comes up shockingly fast, like always, and starts it all. The light through the stained glass colors the bedspread. The blues and yellows and reds—watery in their playful shiftiness, in the way they encroach and lap and cover as the branches of the firs out there sway in the breeze—start by my toes and move upward toward my navel. This is when Agnes wakes up and begins to cry for me—at my navel, without fail.

Maaaa-Maa.

My feet hit the stairs. I hear Paul’s own steps moving down the hallway, into the room I’ve just ceded. The bedroom. In turn, he has ceded this: the rest of the house, dancing with its own light. In nearly every window hangs some little glass ornament, refracting. I pause, and listen to the door latch quietly behind him, the pound pound pound shhh, pound pound pound shhh as he goes from one end of the room to the other, turning on the ball of his foot. A change of scenery, a room not yet filled with stale air pulled through his body, his hell.

Ma! Ma!

I was late to so much knowledge.

When the giant oak split into four equal parts and fell, and the calm Boniface was not crushed, and the pagans who had previously sung to the earth saw at last what this traveler had claimed all along protected him—this Father—how quickly were they absolved of their sin of blindness? Did it matter much how willful it was? If their blindness could have been termed active denial? What if, instead of a loving force, it was a malevolent one being ignored? If Boniface instead allowed himself to be crushed by a tree that was bent on destroying him, to warn the others? As a means of saying: Look! Does the concept of innocence become moot in the rush to escape, to survive? Is it moot without a judge? Is it moot, period?

There are several categories of books on my grandmother’s shelves: Religious texts; field guides; and collections of poetry—barely distinguishable, with their stolid cloth spines and shortened, embossed titles, from the liturgical tomes.

Mysteries line the bottom rows.

Beyond the shelter of our curved little harbor—the grabbing end of the crook—the water is rough; I turn and turn and turn the dory against the chop. I didn’t know it was like this today.

Agnes crawls to the starboard side and pulls herself up by the gunwale.

Agnes! I shout. Down!

She drops to the slatted boards and screams. Not because I scared her, I think. Because she’s not getting what she wants. It’s good she’s down low. If she tumbled out, could I go in after her without losing the boat? I’m not a pro. I don’t know if you’re supposed to have some sort of a license. I keep us on course.

We get to the shore. We get to the car. We get to the city and the library and the internet and the U-Haul where propane is sold—all this civilization.

What’s new, now, is everything I didn’t see. My life behind the curtain.

HOOK

At dusk, we choose another field guide and walk the paths—hardly discernible from the rest of the woods in this early June—to identify what else is new: the trembling bluets and the poking green leaves of adder’s-tongue. And, where we turn toward the beach with our bucket: wood anemone—windflowers, by another name—once thought to open only at the touch of the wind. According to this book. We continue to the beach, to look for supper. Agnes pulls my hand, trying to lead me to the lower reaches, just smoothed by the outgoing tide, where the coppery weed hangs wet over rocks. She knows by now that nothing at the top is fresh enough to eat. But there’s a shrub clinging to the edge of the escarpment, with small waxy leaves, and I’m flipping through the book, trying to name it. Her impatience is frequent, and justified. She’s pulling my shirt, stretching it. Her hunger, now, makes naming impossible. Her hunger drags me away.

The bulbous capsules at the fringe of the seaweed pop between her teeth as her mouth accepts the slimy brine. She chews up the weed, chewing and chewing. She’s not satisfied unless I do it with her. I gag, and try my best to swallow.

I wonder how they helped her, privately. My grandmother. These old stories of men felling trees, et cetera. God knows what else those books contain.

At night, Agnes insists on Rumpelstiltskin. The book is ancient, the translations direct, unbuffered. Aside from What are Brothers Grimm, she asks no questions. She might as well be a snake digesting a rat. I can see the story moving through. I just can’t see what she’s doing with it.

In the morning, we shake the skinny trees so the wetness comes down on our heads, our shoulders.

Will Paul be better in four days? Six? Ten?

Here, on a computer in the library in the city, I look at rental prices. For twenty minutes. I think, if I just look at the next apartment, maybe it will be the one that’s possible. The one that makes things possible. Because what I have learned—what I could have known sooner, if I was looking harder—is that we have no money. None. And only so much time to get off the island before someone finds us out.

Mama! Agnes yells, again.

I know, I say.

What I’m supposed to be looking for, actually—what brought me here—are jobs I can do with a child at my hip. Maybe, seated here, reality hit. The impossibility of it. And this is the way I pivoted: to this other impossible thing, that for some reason felt more possible, for a moment. You get sixty minutes here.

Mama!

I scroll faster, hovering over the keyboard as I stand, apartment listings still flying, unsorted by price now because I’m looking for the one that has slipped through the cracks, the one that only I will find because I’m the one looking at every single listing, even the ones with typos in the price lines, or owners who don’t know how to use the platform.

Mama! Agnes yells again, pulling now at the neckline of my shirt.

We’ll need some place to go when we’re found, or when ice grabs at the rocks, at the pipes running through the house, at the dory—tries to pry apart its wooden boards, seize its puny propeller; when the thin walls, made for summer, are nothing against the shrieking cold, and a single misstep could mean death. The inability to get a fire going, hands too cold to strike a match. Or simple failure to rouse. They say the process of freezing to death is like being lulled into a dream. A capsize amid the winter swells in a necessary trip to shore: for food, for water, for gas to cook with.

It’s June now. The storms that break mooring chains begin in October. But Law can stake its claim whenever.

She left this place to my father. My grandmother.

My father is nowhere to be found.

Seen last in Indiana, en route to Mexico, before I finished high school.

Perhaps she thought this place would bring him back. Perhaps that was her gift.

You wonder if the birds feel it, too, at dawn—the notion that any direction is just as well—when the water is as pink as the sky. I’ll bring Agnes next time, so she can see it too. What she has seen, already, is how at night, the house—with the kitchen light burning—is like a glow at the back of a very dark throat.

Take shower? she says, when I’ve hurried back. And off we go, shaking trees.

I’ve not yet told the executor how long my father’s been gone. I don’t yet know if this process—wherein his absence is realized—is one I should want to speed up, or slow down. My instincts say, Reveal nothing. Use this time.

My grandmother once told me that, not so unexpectedly, lobsters’ hearts slow down as the ambient temperature falls—slowing more, the colder it gets. But that small devices implanted in a study group revealed occasional spontaneous beats—completely unpredictable—from the heart of each lobster. As if two systems are at odds with each other, one attempting to override the other, my grandmother said. What do you think that other system is? she asked me.

The magazines, as they’ve always been, are in a stack beside the woodstove. ...