Atlas and Alice, Issue 18
Megan Driscoll
Modes of Reproduction Pacific Salmon are this funny thing called semelparous. It was a word Ellie taught me, years before she left. She’d sounded it out by the syllable: sem-el-par-ous. Sem like seminary, where she swore Brian Silver was bound to end up, el like Ellie, what she’d called herself since deciding the name Eleanor was too geriatric, and par like pear the fruit, what we snuck from the top shelf of the cupboard where Mama hid everything that cost more than ten cents a piece. Ous was like us. Like Ellie and me. Semelparous meant you had a baby and then you just died. That was how Ellie put it. One miraculously underwhelming reproductive event before your heart went kaput. No pulse. Total flatline. You spent all your years growing big and getting strong only to have a fetus suck the life right out of you. The science books called it a tradeoff. Ellie called it a waste. And after the baby, your legs went all skinny and and your toes bent all weird and the rest of your body shriveled right along, just like a raisin. You were born into it, the same as your mother and her mother before her. You had no say in the matter. It was kind of like living in Holden. “Suzanne Wiley,” Ellie said, jutting her thumb out the window as Suzanne sashayed down the street, leaving the grasses of the meadow swaying in her wake, “is semelparous.” Suzanne Wiley was like all the other Holden girls. She was pretty in a prudish kind of way. That was Ellie’s word for it. Every girl who held their mother’s hand on the way to church was a prude. Uptight. Rigid. Any word she could find she would tack onto the list. Stiff. Boring. Basically lifeless. They fluffed their hair and fattened their lips only to squirm at the lightest touch of a boy’s hand above their knee. She spelled it out for me again. Sem-el-par-ous. Like Pacific Salmon. They were just like fish. Ellie liked to tell me how Suzanne would end up just like her mother, who had ended up just like ours. She laid it out for me. Rural life went like this: when she turned 49
