Carl was the son of a fisherwoman.  A fact which never failed to pain him.  The memory of this truth would cause him, years later, to shrink in rooms he had earned the right to stand tall in.  Down by the bay you could always hear his mother’s voice, the loudest, sharpest, shrillest.  Every phrase was an edict - whether she was arguing with the fishermen, haggling with customers, gossiping with or about the other fisherwomen or praising her god.  She expertly wielded the short knife, sliding it up the length of the belly until the blade turned red. Then she tossed the innards in a growing pile and descaled the still twitching wenchman, parrot and butter fish - fresh from the sea with eyes forever in shock, so recently alive.  Any rare moment of silence was punctuated by a hissing of teeth or a grunted mmhm before looking to the still waters of the sea and finding another reason to rage at the world.

Carl would escape that town, shake off generations of poverty and make peace with the fact that his mother was incapable of loving him. But he had inherited her anger and he could never forget her smell.