by Heidi Biggs

Susan Circone, *Adrift in the Crosswalk,* cotton, silk, cheesecloth, floss, 18 x 12 inches, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.

my progeny

Heidi Biggs | FEB 2024 | Issue 30

Sometimes I think I’ll never be a mother, but I forget I’m already a mother, probably even a grandma. When I was 18, I worked at a fish and game in Alaska. Old Greg and Young Greg would stand in the water all day with waders on, grappling up king salmon that would wander into the concrete pathway alongside the hatchery, and I sat in a folding chair and would bend down toward the salmon’s back and pick a scale off of with tweezers and put it on a little card with a grid that held them in place with water-activated adhesive, and then the Gregs would let the fish go. Fish scales grow like tree rings, and you can hot-press the cards (which I did, listening to Portishead) so they make impressions into clear plastic that can be read with a microscope, divulging secrets of the life of the salmon.

However, if the fish was unlucky, they wouldn’t be let go, they would be kept for spawning — passed into a big concrete holding tank where the fish would eventually get conked, knocked on the head, killed. Dead lady salmons’ guts got zipped open with some hooked X-acto knife designed to slit open fish. The end of the blade-hook was worked into their fish cloaca hole, then pulled, zoink, up the belly, the eggs spilled out, teeny pink balls, into a five-gallon bucket. The dead boy fish got milked into that same bucket with eggs-in-waiting covered in river water, fragile and soft, till the sperm found a way in and the egg hardened into a fertilized marble.

Fish basically die as they procreate anyway in the wild, so what's the difference if they get beat on the head right before their goods are artificially dumped into a bucket with frigid river water and stirred around and fertilized by my hand (one very frozen hand, good thing I just turned 18 or it would be sex with a minor) — there’s not much difference I guess, except for the indignity of being zipped open to get the eggs out instead of spraying them out some fishy cloaca into river-bank-sand, and except for the indignity of the fishes eyes now bugging out, or bloodshot, or missing, when they procreate, because of the way the fish and game guy bludgeoned their brains, and finally, except for the way that the male fish is rubbed out by some big man, who gently holds the fish in the crook of his Eddie Bauer Arm, and thrusts his hand downwards along the belly, and low and behold white cream squirts out the corpse and into the bucket.

I would sit in a shed and stir the eggs covered in creek water with my bare hands, as the eggs got fertilized and hardened, and then, when I needed to pee, I left the buckets of now hard eggs, and walked down to the house beside the salmon hatchery where we had a bathroom and crude kitchen, and I couldn’t use my fingers enough to unbutton my pants. I looked down at my cold red claws, useless, something like a crustacean now, hard and non-nimble appendages grappling with a complex button system, waiting through the painful defrost to finally maneuver through the closure.

And upstairs in that very house during a lunch break, on a different day late in the summer, Young Greg and me on the floor, kissing, we’d taken off coats and waiters, I couldn’t help but stare scientifically at the big pores of his waxy face skin, of which was gradually becoming redder, and his curly long hair pouring down around his head, and the smell of him, a little too musky for me, and his breathing getting louder — and him saying, I want you, and me agreeing, but not really knowing what I wanted or was agreeing to.

I wonder about my grandchildren, swimming around in the waters around the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska. I hope they make it up the waterfall and past the bear claws and past the hatchery and up to some good spawning grounds as their bodies rot apart. I hope they get to spawn on their own terms. I hope they never see a net or a lure and are free in the big gray blue ocean out there, silver sides passing around each other in schools, catching filtered light softly like slow loose confetti.

Heidi Biggs (they/she) is a writer and academic living in Atlanta, GA. They have an interdisciplinary background, holding a B.A. in Literature, MDes in Interaction Design, and PhD in Informatics. They are currently a research scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology exploring intersections of storytelling, theory, design, and technology in relation to climate change. Their writing and research explores queerness, embodiment, land histories, and ecological entanglements and they believe we need new kinds of stories to imagine new worlds.

Susan Circone has lived on both coasts of the U.S. and currently resides in the Portland, OR area. She started quilting in the early 1980s and has been working off and on in fiber ever since. After learning the fundamental skills of quilt construction and how to dye and print her own cloth, she continued her art education at Portland Community College. Susan’s work predominantly uses abstracted microbiological and cell imagery that ties into her background as a research scientist in the geological sciences.