Eel

1 I don’t understand this kindergarten assignment: “Draw Your Clan.” The three letters live in abstraction. A friend suggests mine looks like his, minus legs, and that day I believe my clan is a species of amputee Snipes, birds forced to fly the skies forever, and I wonder if we are meant to symbolize endurance or something beyond my five-year-old comprehension. 2 My mother explains we are not legless birds and if she had a more worldly vocabulary she would have suggested we were ambiguous, not quite a fish, more than a water snake, but she says we are among the few. The last Tuscarora Eel died out a generation ago, so we are left Onondaga Eels among the Tuscarora, voiceless as well as legless. 3 I find an encyclopedia photo, see jagged rows of razor teeth in a mouth perpetually grinning and when I show it to her, she says clans are a system to keep track of families, so we don’t inadvertently marry our relatives, and that we have no more affinity with eels than anyone else on the reservation has with their animals. 4 “If I threw you in the dike,” she says “you’d drown as fast as anyone else,” done with this lesson. I remember older cousins, swimming between my legs, and suddenly I am rising, their hands grabbing my knees as my balls collide with the backs of their necks, and they break the surface, toss me into deeper water, probably watching to make sure I surface, after they’ve had some amusement at my struggle. 5 In wet darkness, I imagine opening my eyes and mouth, taking water in, filling my lungs, discovering gills like Aquaman or Namor, the Sub-mariner. Knowing I had better odds of dying, face down, no voice to call out for help, I am never quite brave enough to try it, not daring enough, even, to open my eyes when my face breaks the stillness of river water contained. 6 But I flip on my back, ears below the surface, listen to mysteries, breathe shallowly at that level, and float, wondering what it would be like to glide the depths on fins, knowing if I were there, I would desire legs and lungs, and then I fill my chest to capacity, and dive, loving and begrudging the ache I find there, the throbbing of my chest begging for release, and I swim back up, eyes still closed, wondering how long it will take to find the surface again.