After 40 years of marriage, Charles’s wife turned into a fish.

“Poof, just like that,” Charles says and snaps his fingers.

His breath comes in short, shallow gulps. He stands on the hot sand and scans the horizon as if she might jump, whalelike, into the air.

You just walked into the water and she disappeared, someone in the crowd asks.

Brown waves crash into white fluffy foam a few feet away making it hard to hear the questions and suggestions from the crowd that grows like sargassum washed onto the beach.

“No, not disappeared,” Charles says angrily. He looks for the person who asked the question but he can’t focus.

She’s missing, he thinks. She’s gone, a tiny voice whispers but Charles pushes it away.

He scans the water again, back and forth, back and forth like windshield wipers. It’s a normal day at the beach—other than for the fact that his wife is now a fish. Large white clouds float by overhead. Up and down the beach, children play, adults lounge, mothers chase babies and fathers drink their beer.

“She turned into a fish right in front of me,” Charles says. He points at his feet and everyone in the crowd look down at Charles’s yellow, thick toenails.

“We came down here to celebrate our anniversary,” he adds “It’s tomorrow.”

Charles tries to take a deep breath but all he can manage is a one gulp at a time. He can’t fill his lungs. He bends over and puts his hands on his knees. He knows it is hot out but the sweat in his armpits and on the back of his neck feel cold.

How could this happen to me, he wonders. This doesn’t just happen. People, women, don’t just turn into fish, he tells himself.

He’s retired. He shouldn’t have to deal with something like this.

After it happened, after she turned into a fish, Charles ran up and down the beach yelling at anyone who would listen. He went up the pier and talked to every fisherman with a line in the water. Have you seen my wife, Charles asked. He begged them to be gentle with the fish they caught as he looked at their long knives and sharp lures.

The fishermen nodded and said uh huh, sure.

“She was about this big,” Charles said and held his hands out in front of him chest width apart.

The fishermen looked at each other and raised their eyebrows once Charles rushed off.

Charles shouted and pulled at his hair and made the families on vacation uncomfortable.

The lifeguard told Charles to calm down. Speak plainly. What exactly happened?

Then the news crew showed up. A van with an antenna on its roof and the station name spelled out in bright colors along the side parked on the seawall at foot of the pier.

“Sir, hello, sir, can you tell us what happened?” says a news reporter who is unprepared for a day at the beach. Her heels sink into the sand. She’s wearing a tight pencil skirt and makeup meant for studio lighting. She looks exaggerated.

“Sir, I’m with Channel 5 can we talk to you for a moment,” Jessica says as she holds a microphone out like a divining rod.

When she dressed that morning, Jessica had been under the impression that she was going to a news conference downtown. The one where all the local and national reporters would be at. But then her boss called and said she had to go to the beach because of some “fish wife man” who was scaring all the tourists.

“Excuse me, sir, please, can you tell us what happened,” she repeats and shoves the microphone in Charles’ face.

Charles had been easy to spot. His pot belly sparkled in the sunlight and his arms, which started out mayonnaise white then turned milk coffee brown about halfway down his forearm, were waving franticly.

When Jimmy, the camera man following two steps behind Jessica, turned on the lights on his shoulder-mounted camera, Charles’s arms dropped to his side. He shut his mouth with a snap and looked into the lens.

“What happened,” Charles asks the black void within the camera’s glass and plastic. “I don’t know. She just. I don’t know.”

His face is red and his hair sparkles with grey and silver. It’s just long enough that he could pull it back in a ponytail but right now it hangs loose and blows in the wind. He tugs at the strands flicking his eyes and tickling his nose. It had been his wife’s idea that he grow it long but he needed her to tie it back.

His wife.

His wife who was now a fish.

Charles turns and points at the waves. Jimmy follows his finger and zooms in so viewers at home can see what Charles’s sees. The place where it happened.

Viewers also see Charles’s heaving chest and the gut held up by bathing trunks with red hibiscus flowers splashed across them. His wife had picked them out for him.

“But sir, can you tell us how this happened,” Jessica asks again as she moves the microphone closer to Charles.

Charles looked from the camera to the waves, to the microphone. He completed a circuit then stated again. Camera, waves, microphone.

His wife wasn’t in any of those places. He clenched and unclenched his hands.

He avoids the reporter’s eyes. He couldn’t even see the faces of the dozen or so people that crowding around them.

Charles had called the police first, of course. That was the only thing that came to mind. The dispatch operator said they’d send the lifeguard over. A young man in short red shorts listened to his story and said “uh huh” a lot before wading into hip deep water. He looked around then radioed for backup.

More lifeguards showed up and to each one Charles explained that they’d been at the beach to celebrate their anniversary.

Forty years together. Three kids. Twenty years with his last company. Can you believe it, Charles asked the lifeguard captain.

The captain nodded. The captain sent the lifeguards out to search. Some were in the water. Others were on jet skis. He’d called the Coast Guard.

No, the captain said, he couldn’t stay here with Charles. There were other parts of the beach they needed to patrol. The radio in the captain’s truck squawked and wailed.

Charles had felt better while the captain had been standing next to him but then he left.

“I finally retired,” Charles said as captain rolled up the truck window and drove away. “Can you believe it? And then she goes and turns into a fish.”

“What kind of fish?”

That’s the question everyone asked Charles next. With the camera rolling and microphone at the ready, Jessica asks the same thing.

Jessica was an experienced reporter and had mastered the skill of nodding and looking concerned while only partly paying attention to Charles’s answers. While Charles sputtered and pointed and pulled loose strands of hair behind ears turning deeper and deeper shades of pink, Jessica was thinking about where she’d left her tennis shoes. The ones she usually kept in the trunk of her car for exactly these situations. Were they at the office? Or did she leave them at some assignment?

Ah. She hears a clicking sound like a finger snap and remembers she left them at her apartment cacked in mud from that assignment at the chicken farm.

More people show up to stand around Charles. The camera and bright light reels them in. The late comers get the story from the ones who’d gotten there earlier.

Wife gone. He wants a fish. Instead of his wife? No, no for his wife. To lure her in? Uh, maybe. What kind of fish does she like?

What kind of fish is shouted over and over. Charles can’t say. He looks at his hands and shakes his head.

The crowd tries to help.

Was she long or short? What color? Grey? Blueish? gold? Did she have wings? Whiskers? A dorsal fin? Does she like fried fish or grilled.

“She’s my wife,” Charles responds but nobody is paying attention.

What’s her name, someone shouts. Charles tries to think. Letters swarm past his mind’s eye. Panic sends a jolt through his torso when he realizes he can’t picture her face.

They’d been together long enough for their kids to grow up and have kids of their own. Long enough for them to have bought and sold five houses. Long enough that Charles didn’t have to look at his wife’s face when he asked her a question.

He’d worked in sales. She had stayed home to raise the kids and, once the last one moved out, she stayed at home because she didn’t know what else to do.

They’d been married long enough for him to have that one affair when his company sent him overseas. But also long enough that she forgave him.

“Sir please, we need to know, what kind of fish did she turn into,” Jessica asks again. She tries to hush the crowd. The random yelling won’t play well on TV.

A man near her leans in and tells her scientists have discovered over 32,000 species of fish. The salty, sweet smell of beer clings to every word.

Jessica tries not to breathe through her nose. She wonders how much longer she needs to spend on the beach. Had the news conference started yet? Had the station sent someone else in her place? Samantha, maybe. Or Norma.

Of course it would be Norma.

Jessica holds microphone closer Charles’s face and then checks her phone for updates.

His eyes melting in the glare of the camera lights, Charles thinks about how much his wife liked to swim but how infrequently they had visited the beach.

She wanted to go somewhere exotic. Tahiti sounds nice, she would say. The water was blue. There were mountains and coral reefs that exploded in color. She would pull the images up on her phone and show them to Charles.

But Galveston was closer, he told her. It was less expensive. The water was only brown because of the silt coming from the Mississippi River. And they even imported clean, white sand from Miami.

They would still have a good time, he said. A wonderful time since they were celebrating their anniversary and his retirement.

Now she was a fish.

He remembers something one of his grandchildren told him. One of those random facts only kids know.

“Grandpa, did you know lipstick is made of fish scales?”

Charles thought of all the times his wife had put on lipstick. He could see her standing at the mirror, looking like a big mouth bass with her lips stuck out and a tube of fish scales going back and forth.

His memory tumbled backwards grasping at anecdotes, fish facts, memories, anything to make it make sense.

Water. She loved water. In fact, her first love was the rivers and creeks she grew up with. On nights when she would drink too much wine, which happened more and more the older she got, she would tell and retell the stories of going to some river or another with her brothers and sisters back when she was young and happy and her parents were still alive.

She’d jump out of a tree and into the waiting arms of her father waist deep in slick green water.

That’s when Charles realizes his mistake.

“She was a freshwater fish,” he says into the camera.

The crowd is silent. Jessica lowers her phone and looks at Charles once again.

“Are you sure,” she asks in a husky whisper.

Jimmy zooms into Charles’s panic-stricken face.

A murmur ripples through the crowd behind the camera.

A freshwater fish. One person whispers to another until the news makes it to the very back of the pack.

“She’s gonna die,” a man finally says. A woman shushes him but it’s what they are all thinking.

It’s too late anyway. Charles hears the man.

Like bullet points in one of his quarterly presentations, Charles goes through all the things he knows about his wife.

She loved Frida Kahlo. He’d bought her Frida themed trinkets on all his business trips anyway. Frida magnets for the fridge. A Frida toy monkey to hang on the bookshelf. Frida key chain for the house keys.

It wasn’t until after the children were born that the migraines began then grew, fungus like, into depression. It was the migraines that had kept her in bed for days even though the one thing she said she wanted to do was to fly. He never understood the migraines either. Or the depression.

Fly like a deer with wings is what Charles remembers her saying. Or was it a monkey with wings?

Definitely not a fish.

Charles turns his back on the camera and the crowd and looks at the waves crashing on the beach. Each one carrying salt, minerals, sand, broken shells. And fish poop, Charles remembers. The ocean was full of fish poop. Another nugget of wisdom from his grandkids.

Jimmy scrambles to get a better shot and Jessica moves with him to keep the microphone in Charles’s face.

“Did your wife want to die,” Jessica askes.

Maybe this was a suicide, she thinks. Or, Jessica’s eyes lit up, maybe it was murder. Had Charles pushed his wife into the water until she became a freshwater fish? Did he know what he was doing when he planned his trip to the beach?

Man Turns Wife into Fish to Cause Her Death.

“Had you too been fighting,” she asks.

Jessica licks her lips as he thinks of headlines for the 10 o’clock news.

The woman died gasping for air, she would say.

Dead Wife Sleeps with the Fishes.

In the brown water of the gulf, she would add. For some reason that was worse than if it had been the crystal-clear waters of the Caribbean where she’d vacationed last year with that ex-boyfriend from college.

If he was going to kill her, he could have at least taken her to the Caribbean, Jessica thinks. That’s what I would want, she assures herself.

Jimmy finds a better spot and once more shines the lights into Charles’s eyes.

“Do you think she swam away,” Jessica asked.

Charles blinks, his eyes gasping for relief from the lights.

The crowd grows impatient. They lob more questions.

Is she still alive?

How long can a freshwater fish survive in salt water?

Not too long.

Do they shrivel up?

No, they don’t. A fish is a fish. It’ll live.

No, she won’t, someone else says.

Down the beach at the far end of the pier, a fishing line grows taught. A fisherman drops his beer and holds the rod tight with both hands. While the crowd can’t hear the whine of the line as the fish dives deeper lodging the hook solidly into the thin flesh around its mouth, they can see the fishing pole bend like an ice cream cone melting in the heat.

A collective gasp springs from the crowd. Jimmy points his camera so he can capture the struggle between angler and fish.

Charles can’t move. He watches the fisherman struggle and pull on the line.

“Marisa,” Charles says but now no one is listening now. Camera man, reporter and crowd move in unison to the fishing pier. Charles stands by himself on the hot sand.

“Marisa was my wife,” Charles says. “She was a freshwater fish.”