Throwback Thursday: The Fishmonger’s Wife

Each week we are taking a look back at the authors, stories, and poems that captivated us in 2019. Today we offer you an excerpt from ‘The Fishmonger’s Wife’ by Michael Bracken, from Issue 21, Winter 2019. 

The Fishmonger’s Wife

by Michael Bracken

At the bottom of the ‘Help Wanted’ sign in the fishmonger’s window, someone had written, ‘No Mermaids’. I flipped the collar of my navy pea coat up over my gills and went in to ask him why.

“It’s me wife, see,” said the fishmonger, a grizzled little man missing two fingers on his left hand. He cocked his head to the side as he took me in, from the dark woollen watch cap pulled tight over my ears all the way down to the duffel bag leaning against my sealskin boots. “Me wife she say they eats all the fishes. I got nothing but fishes, what’s the matter one or two little fishes go missing? I say me wife’s jealous.”

“Of mermaids?”

“Not just the mermaids she’s jealous,” the fishmonger said. His breath smelled of island rum. “She think all the women want me.”

“Do they?”

“All the time I’m here, how do I know for the women want me?” The fishmonger continued eyeing me. I stood half again as tall as he, with broad shoulders, thick chest, and powerful arms evident even though the pea coat covered my torso. “For why you come in here ask me about mermaids? You want for a job?”

I told him I did. I didn’t tell him the smell of fish intoxicated me.

“Why you want for a job?”

“I’ve tired of the sea.”

“What ship you be from?”

I named one that had just left port, a whaling vessel I had often seen in the North Sea.

“A name you got?”

“Morgen,” I said, from the Welsh meaning sea-born, though I doubt the fishmonger knew that. “Morgen ap Rhys.”

“Tomorrow you start,” he said.

To find out what happens next, pick up your copy of Issue 21, Winter  2019 here!

Michael Bracken, recipient of the Edward D Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award for lifetime achievement, is author of several books, including All White Girls and Psi Cops, and more than 1,200 short stories published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Hot Blood:  Strange Bedfellows, The Best American Mystery Stories 2018, and many other anthologies and periodicals. He lives and writes in Texas. Visit him at www.CrimeFictionWriter.com or on Twitter @CrimeFicWriter.