Finding Frozen Nemo by Jeff Kass

Rob LeBer CC



Finding Frozen Nemo


Jesse sprints through the sliding door. One sharp slant past the cash registers, then a breakneck romp through the produce section. At the back of the Kroger, they turn left, fly past three aisles and skid leftward into the fourth. 
      If they’re not in the frozen food aisle before 3:30, Jesse believes the search will be invalid. Nothing good can happen after 3:30, they say. They say her mother told them that once. They don’t trust their mother much, but for some reason, that piece of advice remains sacred to them. They worship it, like a false idol. 
        Hayden, Sahn and I don’t run. 
       We don’t like people to stare at us like they stare at Jesse with their hair that’s dyed half-pink, half a shade of a color they insist we call sapphire. In fact, at one point Jesse wanted everyone to call her Sapphire, and we did – just like we then referred to her as “her” and “she” –but after only a few months, she said, “Call me Jesse again. Sapphire’s dead. And, also, my pronoun is they now.”     
     I didn’t say anything, I’m cool with whatever, so I nodded like I always do, but Sahn had to ask a dumb question, or maybe a smart question, like he always does. “How’d she die?”
      “She died because she tried to resuscitate Nemo by throwing him into a lake, but it was not the real Nemo so he just sank and another fish ate him. It was a death of despair. Sapphire had to die too, out of desperation.”
       “Every day you throw a Nemo into the lake and it sinks,” Sahn said, unhelpfully. “How come Sapphire only died that one time?”
       “Too much despair. The desperation accumulated and became overwhelming.”
       “Desperation and despair are two different things,” Hayden pointed out. “It’s possible, for example, to be desperately in love, or to laugh so desperately that one’s ribs feel a sentiment similar to pain, an ecstatic pain. One who is desperate does not necessarily experience despair.”
       Hayden always talks like that and we usually tolerate it. 
      Sometimes we even encourage it because when she sounds smart it makes all of us feel smart, which is something we don’t usually feel.  Even if pretend we do. 
       Nevertheless, which is the kind of word Hayden likes to use, Sapphire turned into Jesse and they continue to sprint through the Kroger four days a week after school to try to find the right box of frozen fish that will turn into Nemo.
      The rest of us wait in the crackers and chips aisle because Jesse says if anyone else is within a 25-foot radius when they make their purchasing choice, they’ll definitely choose the wrong box of frozen fish. They need to be alone in order to fully connect and feel the Nemo vibes radiating through the glass. 
      “You always choose the wrong box anyway,” Sahn once said, which was a messed-up thing to say, and he told me he later regretted saying it.
        “That doesn’t mean I always will choose wrong,” Jesse clapped back. It was on a day a couple weeks before the Sapphire phase when he was still calling himself Jaxon. “I just know I’ll never feel the purity of the vibes with infidels like you lurking around like a murder of gargoyles.”
       “Gargoyles don’t congregate in murders,” Hayden said. “They gather in clans.”
       “How do you know?” Jesse said. “Are you a fucking gargoyle?”
       Hayden wanted to laugh when Jesse said that. We all did. But we didn’t. And she couldn’t. She shook with the effort not to cry. Once a boy in A.P. US History, the kind of kid who calls the class APUSH and writes his essays with AI and gets pissed when a girl like Hayden does better than him on a test, called her a gargoyle, a fat ugly one who belongs lurking at the top of a prison gate. Jesse knows that story too, so they shouldn’t have said that to Hayden, but Jesse doesn’t always think before they talk, at least not enough, so we usually forgive them.
       Today, they find us in front of a display where Sahn and Hayden are arguing whether Baked Lays are better than Puffed Cheetos. 
       Sahn says, “Look, would you rather get baked and then laid, or feel like your face is swollen and puffy from crying after you got cheated on?”  and it feels like we are on the verge of collapse of western civilization. 
       “Look,” Jesse says, “I found him.”
       They’re showing us a box of frozen fish sticks.
       “Jesse,” Hayden says, “fish sticks aren’t made up of individual fish. Each stick is a conglomeration of fish parts from different fish. Even if it’s possible to resuscitate frozen Nemo, would it be possible to reconstitute him when his parts are all chopped up?”
       “These are organic,” Jesse insists. 
       “That just means the fish were raised in organic fish farms before they got chopped up and mixed together.”
      No one says anything. It looks like Jesse’s face turns into clay, mushy and, like civilization, about to crumble. Tuesdays are the only day we don’t go to Kroger. Jesse has two hours of therapy – an hour solo, an hour with their family. “The only good thing,” they once claimed, “is my dad takes us to Wendy’s afterward. The Chicken Caesar Wraps slap.”
       “I don’t like when people use the word slap to describe a satisfying eating experience,” Sahn said. “It normalizes violence too much.”
       But I was wondering what it must be like for Jesse to eat with their father when he was the one who, when she first said in eighth grade she didn’t want to be Alicia anymore and wanted to go by Allen, told her she was no longer his daughter and could go live with her faggot lesbian aunt. Allen switched to Alana a week later, then Bugle, then Jesse, then Jaxon, Sapphire, and now back to Jesse again. Maybe, at Wendy’s, they just keep their ear buds in the whole time.
       Jesse reforms their face and raises the box of fish sticks above their head. Their sleeves slip down toward their elbows and we can see the many scars near their wrists. “I don’t care what you say. Nothing else has worked. I’m going to the lake and maybe the different fish parts will conglomerate into a brand new magical Nemo and he will break free from his freeze and find his way home. Fuck off if you don’t believe me.”
       We follow Jesse to the lake.
       It’s not really a lake, just a scraggly pond behind the Kroger. The water is murky and features many floating discarded coffee cups and we’ve never seen a single fish there.
       Jesse rips the box apart with their teeth, pulls out a fistful of fish sticks and tosses them high into the air. They splash into the fetid water and Jesse says the prayer. 
        Oh, Nemo the Resilient, Nemo the Resuscitative, Nemo the Resurrectable, we release you from your frozen state. Fear not the ravages of the foamy sea. Find your way home, Nemo. We believe in you. Find your way home.
        Usually after the prayer, we turn and leave, but today Jesse just stares at the water. For a long time. It’s their back now, their shoulders, that look like slumping clay.
        After a few minutes, Sahn pats them on their pink and sapphire head.
       “Maybe it’s because Nemo is a salt water fish,” he suggests. “Maybe we need to throw the fish sticks in the ocean in order for them to conglomerate.”
       A bird chirps behind us and lands on a branch that’s beginning to bud. It’s the first robin of spring and it’s proud, showing off its rust-colored breast, the sun hitting its feathers in a way that makes some of them look white. 
       “Maybe,” Hayden says, “when Nemo unfreezes, he doesn’t come back as a fish. He could be anything, that bird, a coffee cup, the sunset. Transcendentalism is like that. Just because you’re one thing, doesn’t mean all your journeys end, or start again, with your staying that same thing.”
       For a moment, nobody talks. The bird stops chirping too. It seems like it’s listening to us, thinking. 
       Then Jesse smiles. “Nah,” they say. “The fish sticks were a stupid idea. We’ll try again tomorrow.” 
       They point at the gas station across the street. “Food.”
       “No Cheeto puffs,” Sahn says. “Don’t you dare do that to me.”
       “Fucking gargoyle,” Hayden says, and we all laugh. I link my arm through Jesse’s and we skip through the parking lot as if there’s a song we’re listening to even though there’s not one. 

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Jeff Kass teaches Tenth Grade English and Creative Writing at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor MI. The Poetry Editor at Dzanc Books, he’s the award-winning author of Knuckleheads, Independent Publishers Best Short Fiction Collection of 2011, as well as three full-length poetry collections including My Beautiful Hook-nosed Beauty Queen Strut Wave, and Teacher/Pizza Guy, a 2020 Michigan Notable Book and runner-up for Midwest Book Award. He is the winner of the 2024 Toledo Museum of Art Ekphrastic Poetry Contest and a featured poetry instructor with the Michigan Learning Channel. He’s taught poetry classes and workshops to thousands of students, and is a recipient of a prestigious 2023 Jack Hazard Fellowship for writers who teach in public schools. His newest poetry collection, True Believer, consists of poems that spin around and through Marvel Comics and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.




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