‘Like a Fish’ by Brandi Bird

Across the Lake

From Pulp Literature Issue 50, find an excerpt from ‘Like a Fish’ by feature author Brandi Bird below. To read this story in full, along with our feature interview with the author, be sure to pick up a copy of Issue 50, Spring 2026, available for pre-order now.

Like a Fish

by Brandi Bird

Marie feels feverish under the eyes of Agent Daniels. He keeps staring past her brown braids to the slide of her neck, skin tanned and sweating slightly in the midday sun. The small tin boat that launched off the rotting, rusted dock at Stonebend Indian Residential School rocks on the choppy lake. The wind kicks up droplets of lakewater, soothing Marie in the distasteful heat of Agent Daniels’s gaze. Marie is sixteen years old and she’s finished her last day at school. Agent Daniels introduced himself to Marie and the two younger boys who tumbled off the dock into the boat home by barking just his title and his last name. Daniels is an Indian agent Marie has never met before, pink and thick-necked and hailing from the city hundreds of kilometres away. Marie keeps her eyes everywhere but on Daniels, turning between the lake and the whispers of the two boys beside her.

Marie doesn’t recognize the boys. The boys’ and girls’ quarters were separated by a wire fence, and the consequences for sending messages through the barbs was a beating. Not that she was ever all that interested in the boys’ lives anyway. Marie was too focused on cleaning bloody sanitary napkins and learning to sew utility dresses to worry much about the boys planting vegetables in the school gardens. Marie has no siblings of her own and she never particularly wanted them. Watching her friends at school cry over their brothers, their hands and backs shattered by rods when they were caught passing notes to each other, always made Marie flinch. She tries not to flinch just from the memory and listens to the low voices of the boys beside her instead.

“I heard some agents were killed. Three of ’em.” The boy with small, dark eyes says to the other one, who has hair so greasy it reflects light from the lake-water.

“How’d they die?”

“Drained of blood. Like a fish.”

Both boys burst into laughter before Daniels yells at them to keep quiet.

They shut up fast, but the greasy-haired boy flashes Marie a smile. Several of his teeth are missing, although he’s too old for them to have fallen out naturally.

The sky above them is bright, and skinny trees on the lake banks glow green in the June sun. The lake around Stonebend Reserve is fierce, water lifting and jerking up before reuniting with the taut surface. The bush, full of birch trees and high oak at noon, is so inviting during the day. The trees sway gently instead of seizing into one black, impenetrable wall as they do at night. Marie has always been afraid of getting lost in there after the sun sets. She suspects tree branches would string her up by her hair, hang her in the sky until her body hardens tough as bark.

The school stands just on the other side of the lake, but unless someone has a boat or waits for the lake to freeze, the journey home is a long one. Marie’s chest heaves as she realizes she’s been holding her breath. She’ll never have to go back to that place again.

Find the full story in Pulp Literature Issue 50, Spring 2026

Brandi Bird is an Indigiqueer Saulteaux, Cree, and Métis writer and editor from Treaty 1 territory. They currently live and learn on the land of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam peoples (Burnaby, BC). Their debut poetry collection, The All + Flesh (House of Anansi, 2023) won the 2024 Indigenous Voices Award for Poetry in English and was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert, Raymond Souster, and Governor General’s awards. Their latest poetry collection is Pitiful (House of Anansi, 2026).