No Fish to Eat

DIANE KOWALSKI worked the register at a Family Dollar on West Federal Street in Youngstown, Ohio, and she had been working the register at a Family Dollar on West Federal Street in Youngstown, Ohio since 2009, which is to say that for five years she had stood in the same place, wearing the same blue vest, scanning the same items, and listening to the same register beep in the same pitch that had become, to her ears, the soundtrack of a life that was not bad but was also not what she had imagined it would be when she was twenty-two and still believed that Ohio meant something other than a place you were stuck in.

She was thirty-two now. She had a daughter named Amy who was eleven and who had her mother's dark eyes and her father's habit of closing doors too hard. She lived in a apartment on East Avenue that had good heat and bad light and a bathroom where the faucet dripped in a rhythm that she had learned to sleep through.

She drove a 2003 Ford Focus with 187,000 miles on it, and the check engine light had been on since 2012 and she had stopped looking at it because looking at it made her feel things she did not have time for.

Mike O'Brien worked at a warehouse on the edge of town and ate breakfast at a diner on Federal three or four mornings a week. Diane knew this because she drove past the diner on her way to work and sometimes saw his car in the parking lot, a silver Honda that was older than hers and rustier.

She did not think about him. She thought about the price of gas and whether Amy's school needed donations and whether her ex-husband's new girlfriend was the kind of woman who would notice if a child's winter coat was too thin.

One Tuesday, which was a day that was like every other day except that the sky was the colour of a bruise and the wind was coming off the lake in a way that made everything feel colder than it should have been, she was at the diner on Federal because she had taken a wrong turn and because the diner was the only place open at 6 AM that served coffee without asking you for ID.

He was sitting in a booth by the window, eating eggs he would not finish, reading a newspaper he had already read. She stood in the doorway for a moment, holding the door against the wind, and then she walked over and sat down without asking.

"You're far from the register," he said.

"Wrong turn."

"You get a lot of those."

She looked at him. He was wearing a flannel shirt and a cap and the kind of face that people have when they are not trying to be anything in particular. He was not ugly. He was not handsome. He was the kind of man who existed in the background of other people's stories.

"How are you?" she said. It was not a question she had planned to ask. It came out like something that had been waiting in her throat.

"Fine. You?"

"Fine."

They talked about the weather. They talked about the closed steel plant. They talked about the price of gas, which was a joke because the joke was that nobody could afford it and the joke was that nobody was going to stop driving.

At some point, the conversation moved past the weather and into the kind of thing that happens when two people are sitting alone in a diner at 6 AM and the coffee is terrible and the eggs are cold and neither of them has anyone else to talk to.

She said: "You should stay here."

He looked at her, surprised. "Stay here? I'm staying here."

"No. I mean -- stay. This place needs people who --" She stopped. She meant: who notice things. Who care. Who don't treat the world like something they're just passing through. But she didn't say it. She couldn't.

Mike looked at her the way you look at something you don't understand and don't want to pretend you do. He took a sip of coffee, set it down, and said:

"Di. You're a good person. But you're not -- you're not the person I need right now. Or ever, probably."

She nodded. Not because she agreed. Because nodding was what she did.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay."

He finished his eggs. She finished her coffee. She left a dollar on the table for the tip jar, which already had three quarters and a handful of pennies, and she walked out into the wind and the bruise-coloured sky and she drove to work and she stood at her register and she scanned items and the register beeped in the same pitch and nothing had changed and everything had changed.

Mike didn't leave immediately. He hung around for a few more weeks, working at a warehouse on the edge of town, eating breakfast at the diner, nodding at Diane when their paths crossed in the parking lot of the Family Dollar. He bought her a coffee once. He asked about Amy. He tried to be normal.

But the moment had changed the geometry of everything. After that Tuesday, every time they saw each other, there was a small silence between them, a space where the words had been and had been set down and had sat there like dishes on a table that nobody was going to clear.

When he finally left -- not dramatically, just one morning when Diane arrived at work and checked her phone and found a voicemail from an unknown number that said "Sorry, Di. Gotta go. -- M" -- she didn't cry. She put the phone down, made breakfast for Amy, and went to work.

Seven years passed.

Diane moved to a different town in Indiana, worked at a grocery store, got an apartment that didn't have mold in the bathroom. She did not date. Not because she was waiting. Because dating takes energy she didn't have. She read paperback novels in the break room and drank coffee from a thermos that said World's Okayest Employee and she picked up Amy from school on Fridays and they went to a place called Taco Bell and Amy ordered the kids meal and Diane paid and they drove home in the Ford Focus with the check engine light that had been on since 2012.

She heard through a chain of increasingly distant acquaintances that Mike made it out eventually -- Chicago again, then Milwaukee, then somewhere in the suburbs where he has a house and a wife and a job in logistics. She did not feel jealousy. She felt the same way she felt about the weather in January: it is what it is.

She did not think about him much. Not because she had forgotten. Because forgetting takes work and she had enough work doing everything else.

It was a Thursday in March, seven years and some change after the diner, when Diane was working a shift at a motel in Gary, Indiana -- the kind of place where people come when they have nowhere else to go, with neon signs that flicker and pools that are never quite clean and rooms that smell like someone else's mistakes.

It was raining. The radio said there was a flood on I-90 and traffic was backed up for miles. A man checked in, paid with cash, didn't give his real name. Diane processed the transaction without looking up. She handed him the key. She said: "Third floor, end of the hall."

He said thank you. She looked up.

It wasn't Mike. It was just some man. Middle-aged, tired face, a jacket that had seen better weather. But for one second -- one second -- she saw something in his eyes that might have been Mike's eyes, or might have been fluorescent lighting in tired eyes, or might have been nothing at all.

She handed him the key. He took it. He walked away.

The rain continued. The radio continued. The register beeped. Diane stood at her desk and watched the rain move across the parking lot in sheets that looked like curtains and thought about fish, about how her grandmother used to say that people who don't eat fish are people who are afraid of bones, and about how she had never understood that saying until now, until this moment, when she understood that life is a lot like fish: there are bones in everything, and you either learn to swallow around them or you stop eating altogether.

She turned off the radio. She turned on the light. She went back to the computer and checked the next reservation.

There were six rooms left to fill.

© 2026 - Authored by Z R ZHANG ( EL9507135 -- パスポート番号[ちゅうごく] 중국 여권 번호 Номер паспорта หมายเลขหนังสือเดินทาง Passnummer رقم جواز السفر CHN Passport) The aforementioned Author hereby grants to OXFORD INDUSTRIAL HOLDING GROUP (ASIA PACIFIC) CO., LIMITED （BRN74685111） all economic property rights, including but not limited to the rights of: reproduction, distribution, rental, exhibition, performance, communication to the public via information network, adaptation, compilation, commercial operation, authorization for third-party use, and rights enforcement. Such grant is exclusive and irrevocable. The term of such rights shall be 49 years from the date of publication. 联系方式： To contact author， please email to datatorent@yeah.net

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