Ymelda's Infinite Eels
Really, without Ymelda’s infinite eels, the only protein on the island was SPAM and corned beef, and those cans were getting scarce. Some grew their own rice and taro, but there was never enough to go around. This shouldn’t have been the case. The aina wasn’t depleted of nutrients, and rice and taro were still easy to grow even with the rest of the world getting all hot and dead. Ymelda’s mother had once tried to teach folks how to grow coconuts by burying the eels in the red dirt, but people didn’t like having to wait around for the trees to bear fruit.
And so, everyone on the island came to Ymelda’s eel restaurant, and everyone got eels because Ymelda could never run out. As was custom, when the island folk stopped in the restaurant for Ymelda’s infinite eel skewers, they took a bite, shook their heads and said, Your mother was a better cook. Definitely no mahalo or salamat. Certainly no salamat po. Absolutely no mahalo nui loa. Then they took as many servings as they needed to eat in the day and left in their lifted Toyota Tacomas. Some moke uncles would come lean on the counter and say, Gimme da kine, and Ymelda would give them a handful of skewers, and it’d always be the right number.
They’d walk out the door and drive off singing Don Ho, Tiny bubbles, tiny bubbles. The uncles dopplered up the highway.
Her restaurant was a tin roof shack somewhere on the northern shore, with a grill, a service counter, and a Bunsen burner. She’d only been open a couple days out of the week lately, so the villagers of the island were anxious and their faces had gotten greasy from eating only canned meat. They also complained to Ymelda about a squirming in their bellies. Butterflies, butterflies, she had assured them.
Ymelda had been distracted for the past three months by the rice girl, Helena, who smelled sweet and citrusy and salty like li hing mui candy. See, a few times a week, instead of cooking at the restaurant, Ymelda would intertwine her pinky with Helena’s, and they’d squat, heels flat in their slippers, eating fragrant, sticky rice at Helena’s house. The grains filled up Ymelda’s stomach, but also an organ she couldn’t locate. Helena washed the rice for Ymelda three times till it ran clear and measured the water with her pretty pinky finger. She steamed it in a large clay pot with plum blossoms painted on the lid over a low coal fire. Then Helena would send Ymelda off with leftover rice wrapped in a banana leaf and say, Thank you, eel girl, even though all that Ymelda had done was sit there with Helena and her li hing smell. And Ymelda’s stomach would flutter.
This would have to stop. Her mother had once had these feelings, and the islanders had also complained of butterflies in their stomachs. Back then, the eels got weird and lively and wouldn’t stay cooked for long and wriggled their way out of people’s throats and bellies. Ymelda would forget Helena and her rice and the smell of li hing candy because that was her duty to the island.
Ymelda put on her mother’s old apron—the only apron Ymelda owned—and slipped a gutted, headless eel into the glimmering oil of her carbon steel wok, careful to lay it away from herself to avoid the splashes. The frying tempura batter spattered in a way that reminded her of rain on a tin roof; or maybe the sound of pee streaming into a porcelain toilet full of water; or water rushing through a tide pool.
There was that time with Helena two weeks ago. Ymelda had brought her to the pools where the first infinite eels grew, like muscly reeds in the water. Helena couldn’t see them, of course she couldn’t, you’d never see them unless you could see the way Ymelda did. So, they forgot the eels and the two of them walked real slow and talked about mochi instead. Yeah. Maybe, if you didn’t have the restaurant, I’d make mochi with you instead, Helena said. And we’d grow rice together. Grind out the rice flour. Flavor the mochi with taro and red beans and other sweet kine things. I never ate the eels anyways. Helena walked upon this bent coconut tree. For a moment, she started to stumble, and Ymelda held her arms out, but she found her feet.
Ymelda had never wanted so much for a person to fall.
A splatter of oil on her cheek brought Ymelda out of her daydream. By the time the tempura was golden brown, the eel was blue again. Its head was back and its eyes were full and Ymelda was ready with a bucket of freshwater for it to swim into. She plunged her hand into the water and examined the writhing blue eel, dragging one finger along its belly and feeling its heart thumping and its guts contracting and its muscles flexing. The incision she made when she gutted it earlier that morning was gone.
This would not do. She walked the eel back to the butcher block and pierced its head, fixing it to the wood table. It was dead again. Ymelda split the eel’s body open for the second time and she slid its new innards into a clay urn the size of a fat child. She chopped its head off again and it followed the guts into the urn. The urn was full of small eels. The eels squirmed around and made squirmy sounds as the guts fell on top of them.
She cut the dead-again eel’s body into three parts. She skewered the parts and dipped them into shoyu, sugar, and mirin. This time she tried very hard not to remember how she took Helena to the pools where the eels first grew. Maybe not fried. Maybe if I grill them over charcoal they’ll stop being as lively, and the burnt sugar will make me forget the smell of li hing candy.
Ymelda placed the skewered eels over a charcoal grill. The hot logs crackled and the sugar burned just right. My hair is too greasy and my teeth are yellow and my laugh is annoying. Helena could not really love me anyways. Ymelda flipped the eels fourteen times and dipped the eels in shoyu, sugar, and mirin seven times. This time the eel stayed dead, and when she flipped the skewers over the last time, there were twelve pieces instead of three. The clay urn stopped making noise, just in time for Ymelda to serve the first islanders revving on over to her in the sunrise.
Ymelda remembered loving her mother. Ymelda loved her stoic mo’ai face. She loved the rough scrape of her elbows and wanted nothing more than to express this affection through the eels and the oil and the charcoal. In those days when her mother was still alive, no matter how violently the oil boiled and smoked, the eels would not die for Ymelda.
My mother, what did she smell like?
Mother’s fingertips were calloused from years of flipping hot skewers. She handled the eels roughly, and when she got to the last flip, sometimes she’d have more than ten times as many skewers. Mother’s reign over the stove was a good time for the islanders. Even though the reefs were bleached and the boars were gone and the cargo boats stopped coming to the island, they could learn photography and play rugby and write and surf without ever worrying about going hungry.
Once, a man started coming to the tin roof shack and leaving gifts of ube for her mother. Then the restaurant opened late one day, and the islanders complained about that squirming feeling in their stomachs. Her mother stopped getting ube gifts.
When Ymelda was anointed as her mother’s successor, she vowed to reject any personal affection. She vowed never to feel love.
But by taking her mother’s place she had already broken her vow.
In the afternoon, the sun got red and low, and Ymelda knew Helena was on her way from the sweet citrusy scent of li hing in the air. Helena watched Ymelda. Ymelda deliberated her movements like a drunk doing their best sober impression. She flipped the eel skewers, and they multiplied. She fanned the coals where they seemed to be cooling off unevenly. The sugar and mirin and shoyu were a beautiful brown.
Howzit, eel girl, I made too much rice today.
Ymelda did not look up. How many skewers?
Helena placed a banana leaf parcel on the counter. I brought this for you.
I don’t accept payment. Ymelda dipped an eel skewer in shoyu and sugar and mirin.
It’s a small kine gift. Helena gestured with her chin and her curly, brown bob bounced.
Ymelda fought a smile curling up on her lips. She felt a squirming in her stomach. Those butterflies again. You have to leave please, she said, pointing with a skewer that was already stirring with life.
Helena knew that Ymelda could not say thank you. She drove off eel-less in her Toyota Tacoma, taking the scent of li hing candy with her along the warm, sighing mountains of the north shore.
Ymelda flipped the eel fourteen times over the log charcoal and coated it eight times in the sauce. By the time the sugar was brown on the eighth coat, the eel was blue and alive again.
She threw the parts into the clay urn to steel herself. You are the eel woman. The people of the island depend on your duty.
She flipped the three skewers on the grill and they writhed blue and slimy and alive. She split the alive-again eels at the seams, gutted them, beheaded them. She drenched them in tempura batter and slid them into the hot oil of her wok. They still wriggled back to life.
The sunset was red like an umeboshi or like the blinding blood of Ymelda’s infinite eels. She poured the entire clay urn onto the counter and started whacking with her Chinese cleaver until the eels were poi. She salted the eel poi and scooped it back into the clay urn. Drops of the pudding landed on the warm, bare aina of the north shore and wriggled to life into scores of tiny eel bodies. Ymelda hugged the clay urn and ran with her toes gripping the thongs of her slippers across the street and onto the beach where the gulls nested. She flung the poi onto the white sand with one mighty heave.
Ymelda kicked her slippers off and began to run. The sand was cool on her feet, calloused from years of standing and cooking, and if she was not running she might roll around a bit on the beach to feel the grains tickle her nose and try to remember a song from the old days that her mother sang to her—songs about taro and sugar and ube. Ymelda would try to remember them with Helena. She would write new songs for Helena about rice and coconuts and mochi.
Some of the gulls flew off, disturbed by the splatter of eel-poi-chum. From the heights of warm island air, they could see the skewers of eels people had packed with them for their days. And all around the island in the li hing mui sunset, eels were coming back to life and flopping and squirming out of people’s tin roof huts and Toyota Tacomas. Other gulls and albatrosses slurped up greedy mouthfuls of the poi and flew up while their feathered throats swelled. The birds squelched and squawked in panic before splattering down in a tangle of beaks and meat and eels.
The people on the island felt their bellies squirm. Old aunties and tough mokes and Max Holloway look-alikes and ehu girls and all the folk who sang Don Ho and Israel Kamakawiwoʻole and Kolohe Kai felt butterflies ready to burst out of their bodies. A few islanders began to cry, and in a final act of desperation they gathered up their alive-again eels and used their hands to plant them in the red soil as Ymelda’s mother had tried to teach them all those years ago. But it was too late for them to grow into coconuts.
And in a glorious seiche of bile and eel-ish blood and muscle, what slithered out of their throats was love.
A.A. Tojino (he/they) (@clubpenguinmemberhacktutorial) is a writer and trade school dropout from California. They have been supported by fellowships and attended workshops at Tin House, the University of Miami, and the University of California, San Diego. His writing writhes around the Golden State, carceral institutions, and the Pacific Ocean.