September 26, 2025 - “Fish Market, 1984” by Henry Hughes
I picked, rinsed, culled and counted rough gray oysters into red
mesh bags, tagged and hauled to the market where Freddy paid 15¢
apiece, and handed me a beer.
Freddy had the most beautiful daughter, Maya, who danced
between stinky refrigerator trucks and their smoking drivers;
around blue totes, knives, fluttering scales, slime, guts, hoses,
bloody ice in the scuzzy drain,
and put on her clean white apron, gliding behind the long glass
case, past blue claw crabs and sleeping clams, over halibut,
sturgeon, Norwegian salmon, Dover Sole, and mad-eyed mahi-
mahi, to pluck a putty-colored fillet of cheap local bluefish— 99¢ a
pound—slicing off a couple inches and feeding her black cat,
Mermaid, which the Health Department said she shouldn’t do.
It’s what she likes, Maya said. Freddy shook his head and walked
into the back. I patted the cash in my pocket and pet Mermaid,
both of us rewarded and still hungry amid the stilled and stirring
delights of the sea.
Henry Hughes grew up in Port Jefferson, New York, and he continues to maintain strong connections to Long Island and New York City. He is the editor of the recent Everyman’s anthologies, River Poems and River Stories, and the author of five collections of poetry, including Sergeant Dark, forthcoming from Lost Horse Press.
