Catch and Release by Moujan Ardani

Neda watched a little girl clutch her mom’s hand and drag her toward a glassy pen where four puppies were kept. She pointed at one dozing off in the corner. “Can we get this one?” The pet shop owner, hovering nearby, explained that the pups were no more than eight weeks old, all litter mates from a healthy Labrador, and had been just weaned. Yet from where Neda stood, they seemed like an ivory-colored pile of fur with a touch of golden sprinkled onto them. Neda never had the intention of owning a pet, nor did she carry the patience necessary for one, yet here she was. The unexpected company that recently found its way into her apartment had led her here, staring at the sleek bodies of two snakes squirming into one another in a fish tank.

“Do you fancy reptiles?” the owner said as he approached her, looking slightly disappointed at his failed attempt to sell off a puppy. “We have Iguanas and Chameleons, too,” he continued, gesturing to the other side of the shop. Neda was looking for a container where she could keep a reptile, but she merely shook her head. “Just browsing,” she replied, tentatively, as if the shop was a department store and she was looking for a dress. The man seemed unconvinced and was about to move his mouth to say something else. Thankfully his sales pitch was cut short by the sleepy door chime, followed by a twangy “Welcome!” coming from the shop parrot. Neda turned to view her rescuers, an old couple wanting to purchase cat food.

On her way out, she peeked at an aquarium, which contained no fish or water but instead a slumbering chameleon. He must be feeding them sleeping pills; otherwise, why are all the animals so drowsy here?she thought. Mesmerized still by the animal’s iridescent color, she breezed out of the store. The sun had become pale. She wrapped herself in her light cardigan, recalling how, four years ago, while packing, her grandma crammed the sweater into one of the two suitcases filled with all her belongings. “For this wool quality, you have to pay quadruple the price there,” her grandma had remarked in response to Neda’s worries about overweight luggage fees. The old woman was right, but had Neda had a choice at the time, she wouldn’t have bought something like that; although thin, its wool texture was coarse and would give her an itch. Nonetheless, now and then, she wore it. It was a memento, after all. Whenever she felt the longing for home, she would seek another token that would attach her to a land thousands of miles away. Though she had just returned with new trinkets from a two-week trip to her hometown, with the weather being incessantly cold, the peachy jacket would still do the work.

At the bus station, she came across the woman and daughter from the pet shop, amid an ongoing tantrum. Neda quickly surmised that the child’s fit was nothing more than the result of the “No” her mom gave her when asking for a puppy. The swollen eyes and sniffling nose of the girl reminded Neda, too, of how she once asked to keep a dog. Hers was not from a store though; instead, a mutt left on the road’s shoulder where they stopped to have breakfast after a long drive. The little dog had frolicked around them, begging for attention. “Apartments are no place for dogs,” her mother had firmly emphasized. Neda glanced at the woman, who was holding a tissue to her daughter’s nose while asking her to blow harder. She seemed younger than her. She was probably around the same age as her mom had been when she’d denied Neda a pet.

Would the girl later leave her mother, too? Would the woman try to fill her daughter’s void with whatever creature came along as Neda’s mother had done, renouncing her once-spoken wordsabout caring for a pet?

The first time Neda left the house to live by herself was when she immigrated. In the early months, she was enthralled by every single thing. She’d stare at red maples as though the tree was an otherworldly phenomenon; she would savor pies and relish the palate of cinnamon-smeared apples as though the fruit was the one plucked by Eve. She would stay up after midnight- or wake up so early there wouldn’t be a sign of light - to call her mother and appease her by rambling on about nuances of the new life. Her mother, still agitated over the whole immigration subject, would play aloof, giving her terse answers. Neda didn’t succumb to it. She knew her mom was ravenous for every piece of information, that she wouldn’t be satisfied otherwise. Neda felt again like a newly weaned baby acting unruly for a trickle of her mother’s nectar. Once, when Neda was seven, she had to pin a red rose on her school uniform as the first grader’s emblem. The little blossom was lost sometime in the second semester. When her mother heard it was lost, she began to weep, first calmly, then howling like an animal. It was then that Neda realized she wasn’t born to be a child; her mother, unlike others, was the one requiring more care and nurture. That day, she made a rose out of a candy wrapper and tried to placate her mom.

Now that her best friend back home became a parent, Neda’s mother would occasionally complain about the toil of raising a child in one breath, praising her for not having one in the next. Neda would grin, not leaking a word, while thinking about the burden of being a child. It seemed to Neda, that when becoming a parent - you’d choose, you’d plan, you’d drink, you would be madly in love or too late to decide.

As for being an offspring? You are a choice made, a mistake, an accident, a yield, or a flag holder of your family genes. And if the child is deemed a mistake? The former might find a chance to rectify the blunder, dispose of a bad yield, or renounce its creation; whereas the latter is only an object, an accident, and will remain one forever unless denied by the perpetrator. A mistake cannot omit itself; a progeny bears the genes of the folks involuntarily, although it might strive to sever the strings attached to them.

Ten years prior to her departure, she had been granted a full scholarship from the University of Alberta. It was a great opportunity, not only for the future it promised, but because with it she could eventually slash the umbilical cord around her neck that fastened her to her mother. But Mother, always a few steps ahead of her daughter, “fell ill”, as she liked to call it. It was more an allergy than disease, but triggered her (never more than minor, as far as Neda could recall) asthma. “It has never been this intense. My breath feels like fire,” She had said, rubbing her chest with her fingertips while being probed by the doctor. “I devoted my life to raising this one, and now she wants to run away. Is this fair? You tell me.” She gestured toward the doctor. He nodded, smiling pitifully at Neda as her face blushed. Not knowing what to do, she quickly left the room. I’m stuck, she had thought, a fish on a hook.

Later, her dad, ever the decorative figure, assured Neda that her mother would get accustomed to her absence. But a fish can’t unhook itself only by yearning for the ocean. The angler is the one to loosen it; her mother never did. Instead, she believed a child should be a cane to her parents’ old age. So Neda stayed, sending an apologetic letter to the professor with whom she had been corresponding, blaming her mother’s ailment. By the time the email was in her sent box, her mother’s illness had dwindled back to two, three coughs a day.

She had often wondered — both before she finally left, whenever she’d heard of a relative or a friend moving abroad, and after, whenever she bumped into a young student on campus — what could have been made of her, had she had seized the moment earlier and left. “The fish is always fresh when caught from the water,” her grandma replied when Neda had let her know about her decision to finally set out for a new life, to truly leave. It was her grandmother, too, who had suggested withholding the immigration plan from her mother until things were all sorted out. “People are like jars. She is a smallone, your mother. She doesn’t have the capacity to know things,” she had noted. Three weeks before leaving, Neda disclosed the news to her mom. For one day, she locked herself in the bedroom, then finally coming out, her eyes two crimson balls.

Neda, sitting across from the pet shop girl on the bus, studied her. The child, hands crossed over her chest, was still whimpering; she was staring anywhere but her mother’s direction. She reminded Neda now less of herself as a child and more of her own mother on the night her father drove the three of them to the airport, the quiet air thick with tension. When the girl and her mother got off the bus, Neda waved at her. The girl only grimaced, striding ahead of her mom.

It took several months, hours of video calls, and hundreds of random photos until the ice between Neda and her mom melted. Mom had become chattier, sharing pictures of the birthday parties, plants that she had grafted, dishes with her newly invented recipes. Sometimes she would mention changes she had made to Neda’s room, asking her if she could donate clothes or books she had left behind. Was she letting go of me? Neda would think, when she’d leave voice messages after calling her a couple of times. Her mother would eventually call back: “Your dad and I went for a walk,” or “I was invited to a friend’s house,” she’d say.

During this time, Neda pondered a lot about the fishhook she was barbed on. If her mother had released her, why did she still feel impaled? Neda, sprawled on a mustard couch in her dim apartment, downing wine straight from the bottle, came to a conclusion one night. Maybe she’d just loosened the reel? Let her thirty-three-year-old daughter drag the line, all the way to another country? That same night, she called her mom, and after eight rings, she picked up. “Sorry, my hands were tied with cleaning, and Smith was driving me crazy, constantly getting in my way,” Mom panted. “Who is Smith, mom?” Neda drawled. “What do you mean by who Smith is?” her mom answered. “What I meant is clear: who is this Smith?” Neda retorted suspiciously. It was not a usual name in Iran, she thought. “But I already told you who he is. Are you drunk?” Neda’s mother asked. “No, I’m not drunk, and you haven’t told me anything as such. Did you guys adopt a dog or something?!” Neda almost snapped. “Your daughter thinks we got a dog,” her mother giggled. Neda’s dad’s laughter was in her earshot. For a second, she thought about the dog they had found on the road, his unsteady legs, and teary eyes.

“Stop teasing me, Mom,” she murmured, feeling somewhat betrayed. “It’s a gecko, my gecko,” her mother said, still chuckling. “What? Where did you get it from?” she asked incredulously. The derision in her mother’s reply was familiar: “We didn’t get it from anywhere; he came to us.” The saga was such: Mother had been sweeping around her flowerpots when something had slid on the tiles swiftly. When she looked closer, her attention was drawn by a pair of tiny, bulged eyes moving fast in their socket. She told Neda that the gecko stood still while she was done with dusting, then she had thrown a pruned leaf at him, and the result was a subtle wag in the gecko’s tail; something that Mother deemed as the gecko’s amicability. Neda obediently listened to her mom’s seemingly never-ending rant on how she encountered the gecko, and came to a second conclusion.

She hadn’t set me free. She had merely found a new toy.

Neda began to sense an initially unfathomable feeling. She didn’t have a name for it. This something had been roiling in her stomach until it gradually reached its way to her throat as if a lump. It went up to her mouth, about to become a spew, then paused before burrowing a tunnel to her eyes. The same eyes with which she stared at the photos of Smith her mother would send. As ludicrous as it was, she could imagine her mom retrieving the fish line, inspecting her from head to toe, then winding up a matching line hooked to the gecko. Which one of them would she keep? The gecko that, according to her, had a magic power and could grow his tail back after having it cut? Or a daughter whose only aptitudes were solving mathematics problems and abandoning her mother.

One morning she woke up to her mother’s call, it was night in their time zone and the party they had thrown was just over “I couldn’t help but call you just now” her mom exclaimed. She told Neda that Smith had joined them while dining with their guests, but for the gecko doesn’t know table manners, he crawled up to a friend’s leg. “There’s a lizard stuck to me, she shouted. You had to see her face for yourself.” The woman’s husband helped her to shake Smith off her leg, but he wouldn’t surrender as though piercing his fingers into her skin. “Apparently, this little guy loves lady’s legs. It’s probably time for him to find love.” her mother joked.

As she stepped into her apartment, the first thing Neda gazed at was the mason jar she had left on the coffee table. The early evening light was fluttering on the wall, striving to stretch the day as long as it could.

Looking at the jar, the low sun rays filtering through it, you could think it was empty. Neda picked it up, shaking it cautiously as if blending its invisible ingredients. A barely ten-centimeter creature, with its bumpy skin and star-shaped limbs, lay on the bottom of it. It was becoming pallid in color, once dusty pink, now beige. Neda turned the jar in her hand, staring at the gecko’s latched eyes. Was it dead? In the brightness of the late morning, it had looked just fine. It had even eaten a bite of the potato chip she had put in the jar. “Smith?” she whispered hesitantly.

In her recent trip to Iran, Neda discovered it was her dad who had chosen the name for the reptile. He had been lying down in front of the TV when Neda’s mother asked for a proper name suitable for a gecko. The movie credits were rolling when his eyes landed on a name. “Let’s call him Smith, I yelled,” he’d recounted, all jolly about the petty task that his wife appointed him to. Neda’s mother always allowed him to make a decision of his own.

Neda twisted the lid and opened it. A distinct musty odor emanated from the jar, and made her nauseated. She took a chopstick left on the table and poked the gecko’s body; its claws were stiffened as though it was gripping onto something. A cluster of red dots speckled under the gecko’s bloated belly; The internet said they could be an indication of the animal’s sex. Was this the reason her mother referred to the gecko as a male? She speculated. Or was it simply her longing for a son that made her feign again she had one, as she sometimes had with Neda.

She’d enrolled Neda in children’s martial arts classes, until Neda’s body bloomed; state law would be contradicted if she continued to learn among boys. It was there that Neda struck up a friendship with a classmate, a bond she had never experienced before.

When her mom discovered the friendship, she coerced her to end it. “Boys and girls are perilous to one another, like fire and cotton balls. You wouldn’t let them get close, otherwise what remains is nothing but ashes.” Her mother stated, confiscating the book that the boy had gifted to Neda. A book about Ramanujan, the genius mathematician. For years, when dreaming of their friendship, all Neda remembered was the painting of a rather shy man with a pair of big black eyes on that book’s cover, along with her mom’s scolding voice, making fun of the book not being new and reading a note left on its first page “To my dear husband, for his eternal love for numbers.” The boy’s mother had written for his dad.

Love belonged to others, Neda had learned, either watching it from afar, on the screen, or through her friends who were tasting it. For her, knowing its flavor existed was enough. She thought of herself as though she was on a love diet, restraining herself even from a small bite. After her immigration, however, she would allow herself on occasion to binge bouts of affection. Still, she treated love like a bulimic. Once it trespassed its ephemeral nature and felt heavy on her heart, she would easily purge it, so much so that there wouldn’t be any remnant left to dwell on, no trinkets saved.

Two nights earlier, Neda had mustered her will to unpack her luggage, which had lay neglected by the door. As she unlocked her suitcase, she immediately noticed a rustling sound. Neda was removing the vacuum-sealed bags of nuts her grandma gifted her from the top when her eyes settled on something: a gecko, petrified in its place, staring at her. Neda froze. Neither of them blinked. Neda slowly retreated, then tiptoed stealthily to the kitchen. At first, she grabbed a broom, thinking she might have to sweep the creature away.

No, that wouldn’t do, it could escape through the bristles. Neda went searching the cabinet and in it, she found an empty jar. A plan instantly clicked: She would gently coax the gecko into the jar and toss it outside of the window, into the hedging plants in front of her apartment. That way, the gecko could land alive in the garden and live happily ever after. But it was easier said than done. As she tried to cover its sleek body with a tea cloth, the gecko swiftly darted out of the suitcase and glided across the floor toward the living room. She followed it, desperately looking for something to control the gecko with. Mindlessly she grabbed a hand sanitizer spray on the countertop and sprayed it vehemently on the miniature animal. Initially unperturbed, the gecko continued moving. A few steps in, the gecko gradually became disoriented, as if a drunkard staggering on the street. Neda stood beside it as a hunter would, casting a shadow over her prey. Gazing down, the gecko appeared even smaller than its actual size, still breathing. It was alive, Neda surmised. Was that Smith, though? Had it traveled all the way from Iran with her?How did it survive the journey? She squatted as she carefully wiped the gecko’s body into the jar.

After catching the gecko, Neda didn’t sleep until dawn. Instead she studied the animal in the jar, comparing it to a photo of Smith for the thousandth time. One licking its body lethargically in the jar, the other one inert in an image, but both sharing the very same grey patch elongated from their eyes to nose. The picture she gazed at was the only one shared with a caption. “BAD BOY,” her mother capitalized. When she first received the message, before her visit back home, a vindictive sneer had lingered on Neda’s face. Having a gecko son around wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows after all, she had thought.

The plane had been still taxiing when she called home to let her mother know about the safe landing, as she was asked to do so. Mother told Neda that Smith was spotted on the balcony, loitering around the Pictus pots. “My adventurous son” she had referred to the gecko, adding that he had gotten remarkably plump since his last appearance. When Neda later caught the animal, her thoughts immediately went to the phone call. It allowed her to brush off the idea of the suitcase gecko being Smith. But when the first sunlight of the day emerged, her mother sent a new video, a gecko devouring something that resembled a dead fly. Neda replayed that short clip repeatedly. Each time she became more assured that the gecko in the footage was not Smith. How could her mother not realize the same? Was she shutting her eyes to whatever was conspicuous and illustrating a reality unknown to everyone but herself? Or merely foisting someone or something else up, instead of the one who left. Had she done the same thing when her daughter was gone? Neda ruminated before drafting a message to her mother asking if she was certain that it was Smith in the video. After rewriting and erasing several times, she gave up.

Now that the gecko was no longer alive, the circumstances had changed. The ethical imperative was to inform the family member of the deceased. Neda glared at the animal’s tiny body resting at the jar’s base. Perhaps she could share a photo of Smith with her mother, sending her condolences. But she thought about what her grandma had told her about people as vessels; no matter what, she’d never wished her mom to shatter as she had already borne several cracks on her.

As the day broke, Neda grabbed the jar, placed it in a tote bag, and strolled down outside to 112 St. She walked towards a nearby dumpster, ready to dispose of the body; as she got close, she felt a sudden change of heart.

Neda continued walking, past the campus and toward the North Saskatchewan River. The azure hue of the water was so vibrant that glancing at it could transform the darkest iris into a tint of blue. Anglers were scattered about, located in their chosen spots, with rods in hand or propped against the folding stools, waiting to get geared up. She moved past them, headed toward a row of cedars. Sitting on a wooden bench by the riverbank, she retrieved the jar from the bag. Its glassy surface felt cold in her hands. She cradled it for a while, until her body warmth tempered the exterior. Then, without sparing a glance at the gecko inside, she tossed it, as though casting a message in a bottle. A light plop, and then the floating jar was lazily carried away by the current.

There was a cheering commotion in the distance coming from the fishermen. Gazing in their direction, Neda noticed a sign planted in the ground: Catch and Release Only. In her four years of being here, this was the first time she had seen it. One could capture a fish for recreational matters, then throw it back to where it belonged. Would a wounded fish be worthier than a dead one, for the scar could heal only if that fish didn’t get hooked again? Neda pondered, snapping a photograph of the river. She opened up her messages, sending the photo to her mom.