SEAFOOD

I hate seafood. It is simple as that. My mother looks at me every time while chopping up a flopping fish, a tight lipped smile on her face, and informs me that when I was little I would inhale fish by the ton, and I ate enough fish each day to feed small armies in Monaco.

“I don’t understand you,” she nags, “You used to like fish.”

“I don’t remember ever liking it.”

My dad laughs.

Some days my mother and father will take me out to seafood restaurants to eat. My mother loves seafood; she was born next to sea and I have always thought she was secretly a mermaid. It’s too bad I wasn’t born with her fish-loving mermaid powers.

“You shouldn’t knock something before you try it,” she says while sucking out the brains of something that looks like a combination of a lobster and a crab.

“I never liked seafood.”

“It’s tasty.”

“But I don’t think so,”

“It’s good for you. Omega – 3 and all that.”

“But I don’t enjoy fish.”

“You’re going to like it.”

“I don’t like it.” I sigh, scowling at my father who is laughing his brains out in the background with a bowl of clam chowder.

It’s not like I haven’t tried seafood before.  I remember the times biting into a piece of shrimp and tasting the sandy shores of some distant beach. Tasting the strong smell of the ocean with each bite of some bulging-eyed fish.

Maybe I don’t hate seafood. Maybe I hate the thought of it because my mother is so ready to stuff it down my face 24/7.