Personal Narrative - Catapulting Fish :: Personal Narrative Writing

Catapulting Fish I saw fish. We all did. Little silver fish the size of my palm were all lying sideways on the surface of the water. There were just a few at first, but they kept appearing. I saw a little boy point to a fish and ask his father about it. The boy knew the difference between the fake shark and the real dead fish. I entered Amityville from the employee entrance. Just past the break room there is a 7-foot-tall light blue wooden gate door. Even from there, I could smell it. I made my way up the stairs to the crows’ nest, wearing my uniform and nametag, and opened another blue door. There inside was an old couch, stained and saturated with lagoon water and the skippers’ sweat through the years. I swiped in on the time clock and went back down the stairs to the unload dock to learn which rotation I had been placed in, and with whom. In the closet, on the west end of the unload dock there was a dry erase board with the assigned positions for the skippers during their shifts. I do not remember which rotation I had that day, but I do remember how hard it was to breathe. When I bumped into my first rotation of the day, I discovered a little more about the disaster that accompanied the sharp chlorine-like stench. From the front of the boat, I could see months of accumulated hydraulic fluid floating in metallic and neon colored swirls at the surface of the murky brown lagoon water. The water had been murky for as long as I had worked at JAWS, but that day all of the reasons for its usual questionable color and odor rose to the surface. The boat rounded the corner between the unload and load docks, and arrived at the loading dock, where another skipper at a different stage in his rotation counted the passengers and closed the gate of my boat.