The Fish Left Behind

My gram was psychic. Her five daughters tell a childhood story about one of them falling in a friend’s backyard and breaking her arm. While one sister was running up the street to get my gram for help, my gram was running down the street towards her injured daughter. I picture my gram as the young, brunette mother of the 1960s with curlers in her hair and an apron waving in the wind like a cape as she raced down the street. It was years later before my gram’s daughters began to question how my gram knew that something was wrong, and even more, how she knew in which direction to run. How did she know? This was the late sixties. My gram had no idea where in the neighborhood her daughters were. They’d been out of the house all day; they could’ve been anywhere. There were no cellphones. This was the age where moms stood on their front porch and hollered the names of their kids when they needed them to come home. Either their kids heard their mom calling, or someone who knew them did, and when they crossed paths with those kids, they’d say something like: your mom’s looking for you. Years later, when asked how she knew which direction to go to find her injured daughter, my gram shrugged and said: I just knew. 

Once, when my gram was in her eighties, she told me that when something bad happened to her oldest daughter, my gram would dream of fish. That’s how she phrased it. My gram would dream of fish and then wake up in a panic and call her oldest. Maybe a daughter broke her leg, or a husband lost his job, or a son was in a car accident. My gram was never wrong. Anytime something bad happened to her oldest, my gram knew it before being told because she dreamed of fish. 

Thirteen years ago, my gram passed away. Back when she told me the story, I didn’t think to ask what the fish in the dreams looked like, but now that she’s gone, I think about this all the time. I mean, a catfish and a goldfish are two very different fish. Was it one of them? Both of them? Was it a single fish or multiple fish? Were the fish swimming in a tank, floating above technicolored rocks, or were the fish dangling from a line, freshly pulled from a lake? Maybe it was something else entirely, a piece of cod or salmon, grilled and plated, smothered in garlic butter. It seems such a silly thing to obsess over: what kind of fish was it? It’s not important at all, and still, I round back to that detail all the time. Maybe it’s the writer in me, wanting to see every specific detail, but I think it’s something more. My gram told me that story years before she passed. What was I doing with that time, the time between hearing that fish story and watching my gram leave this world behind? It’s the feeling that I didn’t give her the attention that she deserved, that I somehow made the dreams, and her by extension, less important by not asking about the fish. What was I doing, what were we talking about all those subsequent years that I never circled back to the fish dream story? 

I don’t have prophetic dreams. The night before my gram died, I don’t remember dreaming of anything. Maybe this is silly, but If I could see her one last time, I’d ask about the fish. I’d have her describe as much of those dreams as she possibly could, right down to the number of shimmering scales on those prophetic fish. I can’t see the future, but I can learn from my past. If I met my gram one last time, I’d borrow from my future regret and ask her one final question. 

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