Knife and Bucket

- a short story about how a man haunted by sterility learns to touch life's mess

Knife and Bucket

-by S. Francis Burns

The road to the clinic is a river of brown water. Potholes open and close under the rain. He parks where the gravel sits an inch higher than the ditch. The bonnet ticks as it cools. From somewhere down the block: the faint chorus from the Pentecostal church.

Inside, disinfectant and mildew. Light bulbs buzz. The floor still holds last night’s footprints.

He begins the ritual.

Gloves first. Then the tray: thermometers, gauze, stethoscope, tongue depressors lined up edge to edge. He checks the otoscope battery. Checks again. Squares the stack of forms until the corners agree.

Then the sink.

He washes his hands once. Twice. The third time he slows, working soap into the cut along his thumb. The water runs cloudy, then clear. He dries his hands. Still damp. The towel leaves small hairs on his skin. He washes them again.

Litia arrives at seven, shaking out her umbrella.
“Morning, doctor.”
“Morning.”
“You start early.”
“Slept badly.”
She laughs, puts her lunch tin in the fridge.

A boy in a Superman shirt appears at the door, bare feet shiny with rain.
“You talk funny,” he says.
“Irish,” Eamon says.
“I-rich?”
“Only in accent.”

Silence, then the brief grin that comes when silence is too long. Litia lifts a clipboard. The boy giggles because now it’s safe to.

“Say ‘cassava',’ doc.” the boy smiles.
”Cahs-SAH-vah.”
The boy beams at the nurse, “He killed it.”
”Better than kiling me, eh?” Eamon tries.
The boy doesn’t understand and scratches his hip.

The boy’s mother steps in behind him, talking fast in Fijian, two weeks of cough, worse at night. Litia translates, trimming the edges.

“Let’s have a look,” Eamon says.

The boy climbs onto the table, suddenly serious. Eamon warms the diaphragm of the stethoscope with his palm and presses it to the small back. The boy flinches at the first touch, then holds still.

“Deep breath,” Eamon says. The boy inhales. The faint wheeze threads the sound, salt and something heavier.“Again.”

He listens at four points, front and back. Checks the throat, tonsils angry but not touching. Taps once over the sternum. The boy watches his face for a verdict.

Eamon writes on the chart, crosses something out, writes it again. He prescribes syrup, explains the dosing to Litia, who explains it to the mother, her voice smoothing what his did not. The mother nods, eyes on the paper more than on him. “Vinaka,” the mother says. The boy waves. Eamon raises a hand a half-second late.

Rain thickens against the shutters. The sound comes in waves.

Two nephews arrive carrying an old man between them, each with a hand under an armpit. The smell comes first, wet cloth, smoke, a deeper sour that clings.

They ease him onto the cot. Eamon kneels and peels the bandage back. The skin is swollen, glazed, a red line reaching up the calf. Warm through the glove.

“You’re the missionary’s boy,” the man says.

Eamon looks at him. Looks at the wound. “Let’s clean this.”

“This will sting.”

The man watches him, mouth a line that could be a smile.

“You wash too much,” he murmurs.
Eamon doesn’t answer. He tapes the bandage, checks the edges.

”Come back in two days,” Eamon says.
The man laughs, a small sound. “Maybe you come back.”

They go. Litia fans the air with a rolled magazine. “That smell,” she says.

Eamon is at the sink again. The soap slides in his palm, slick, translucent, almost gone. The water runs cold. He turns it off. Turns it on again.

He writes the note, crosses it out, writes it smaller. Underlines the instruction to return. The pen leaves a groove in the paper.

From the hill he can hear the market. A generator coughing, a voice on the radio shouting something he can’t make out, the scrape of knife on wood.

He dries his hands and looks at them. The creases raw at the knuckles. The cut on his thumb has reopened. A bead of red wells and vanishes in the water still on his skin.

At the window, a spill of color through the mist. Umbrellas, a woman in a sulu haggling with a man who only shrugs. Someone laughs. The radio stutters, rugby highlights, then static.

He stands there long enough for the towel to cool in his hand. The fan ticks above him. The rain begins again.

By midday, the rain gives up. The air steams.

Eamon leaves the clinic through the side door, sleeves rolled. He cuts down the hill past tin-roof shops, barber, tailor, a bakery that smells more of kerosene than bread.

The closer he gets to the market, the louder it becomes. Knives on wood, vendors shouting prices, a generator coughing black smoke. A radio flips between rugby highlights and a hymn, the switch abrupt, as if handled by someone half-listening to both worlds.

The smell hits first, salt, diesel, rot, and something sweet beneath it, like fruit going to syrup. Flies rise where he walks.

He circles the edge of the stalls once. Stops at a papaya vendor, moves on. The fish tables run in a row, surfaces dark and wet.

Mere. Barefoot, hair twisted in a loose knot, arms glossy with water and scales. She’s scaling fish with a short knife, rhythm steady. Scrape, flick, rinse, repeat. A boy fans flies beside her with a strip of cardboard.

She glances up.
“Bula, doctor,” she says. “You get hungry, or you get lonely up there?”
“Maybe both.”
“Two for one.”

She doesn’t laugh. He can’t tell if it was meant as a joke.

“Busy day,” he says.
“Same as yesterday.”
“Good, then.”
“Same.”

He watches her hands, fast, precise. She sets the blade under the gill, draws a clean seam, thumbs the spine free, rinses. The motion makes a whisper he feels in his teeth.

The boy grins at him. “Doctor afraid of fish?”
“Only the clever ones,” Eamon says.
“Then you safe.” The boy laughs.

Mere nudges a plastic crate toward him. “Tiko. Sit. You make the place look official.”
He sits.

“You wash your hands too much,” she says.
“Occupational hazard.”
“Or personality.”
“Both.”

“You work at the clinic up the hill,” she says.
“That’s right.”
“My cousin went there once. Didn’t like the smell.”
“Neither do I.”
She nods. “Good. Close to soap.”

He glances at the buckets, the slick heap of fish heads inside.
“You’ve got a business,” he says.
She shrugs. “It’s work. You people call it something when you not doing it.”

She rinses the knife, passes it to him. “You try.”
“I’m paperwork.”
“Paper don’t bleed, you need bleed.”

The knife is heavier than he expects, handle worn smooth. He looks for the seam, can’t find it. The first push grazes only skin. The second tears too deep. The belly opens with a soft pop.

The boy laughs. Mere doesn’t. She leans in, guiding his hand without touching. “Not up,” she says. “Along.”

He adjusts. The flesh yields. Blood leaks down his wrist.
She nods. “Better.”

He looks at his hands, the fish. “Not sure I should be here.”
“Then why you come?”
“Fresh air.”
She laughs, not loud, but real. “Bad choice.”

Someone at the next table calls her name. She turns away, wipes the blade on her hip, slips into Fijian too quick for him to follow. The voices rise and settle, coins clink, a parcel changes hands. He watches the side of her face, the unbothered natural way she bargains, the way people come to her without looking twice at him. He shifts on the crate and realizes he hasn’t breathed properly. He does, once, and tastes diesel.

She comes back and pushes another fish toward him. “Try again.”

He cuts. Wrong again. The knife jumps, catches, skates. She says nothing, only watches until he’s through, then she takes the fish and fixes three inches in two movements, quick as a blink.

Rain begins again. Vendors throw tarps across their stalls, unhurried.

Mere hums something low and tuneless.
“What’s that song?” he asks.
“Old one. From home.”
“Which part?”
“All parts.”
The melody snags somewhere, something his mother used to hum.

“You don’t like the rain?” she says.
“It reminds me of Ireland.”
“You miss it?”
“Sometimes. Mostly the weather.”
“You already have it here,” she says.

The boy returns with new ice, sloshing meltwater across the floor.
“Doctor baptized,” he says.
“Not again,” Eamon mutters.
Mere smirks. “Once not enough?”

She sets another fish in front of him. He hesitates. She waits.
He tries the seam the way she did. The blade finds a path, then stutters. He corrects.
“Along,” she reminds him, soft, not patient, not unkind.

A woman in a sulu comes to the table, talks fast, points at three fish, changes her mind twice. Mere wraps, weighs with her hand, says a number that makes the woman laugh. They split the difference without looking up. A radio a few tables over throws out a score. Two men shout back at it. Diesel shifts to brine. A whiff of yaqona drifts from somewhere deep in the market. The generator coughs.

“You smell of clinic, bete,” Mere says, not looking at him.
He glances at his wrists. Sanitizer he can’t quite wash off.
“I brought nothing,” he says.
“You brought your hands,” she says. “That’s enough trouble.”

He opens his mouth, closes it. The boy is watching him with a kind of solemn interest now, as if expecting a trick.

He finishes the cut. It isn’t clean. It is a cut.

When he’s done, Mere takes the fish, wraps it in newspaper. “For Litia,” she says.
“How…”
“You smell of clinic.”

He sets the knife down, wipes his wrist on the corner of his shirt, catches himself, leaves the smear.

“You’ll come tomorrow,” she says.
“I should be at work.”
“Work waits.”
He stands. “How much?”
She shakes her head. “Not today.”

The boy fans. Mere says something in Fijian. The boy laughs harder.

Eamon doesn’t ask for a translation.

He waits a beat, thinking she might say something else. She doesn’t. She has turned to the next customer, already weighing, already cutting.

Outside the awning, the rain has lifted to mist. He steps into it. The parcel is warm through the paper. He takes the hill in slow strides, shoes sliding once on a patch of algae near the drain. A truck passes, throwing a sheet of water against his calves. He doesn’t look down.

The smell follows him, brine and diesel and the hint of something sweet turning, climbing with him all the way to the clinic.

By late afternoon, the clinic feels swollen with the day’s heat, air thick as breath that never left. The fan above the cot pushes it in slow circles, moving nothing.

The old man is back. Alone this time. He leans on the wall, catching his breath before lowering himself onto the cot, each joint making a small complaint. His shirt is damp, collar turned up like he dressed in a hurry.

Eamon rolls the tray closer, unwraps the leg. The bandage clings. The smell arrives, fermented, almost sweet, and spreads through the room. Litia turns her face aside, fetches the basin, fills it halfway.

He doesn’t speak. Just works. The wound is darker today, the edges glazed. He slides gauze under the leg, lifts gently. Sweat runs down his neck, soaks into his collar.

The old man hums under his breath. A tune without melody. It starts, stops, starts again.

The sound prickles at Eamon. He presses harder than he means to.
“Too much?” he asks.
The man’s eyes open. “You careful like your mother,” he says.
Eamon hesitates, tape in hand. “You knew her?”
The man shrugs. “Everybody knew her.”

He tapes in silence, pulling the gauze tighter. The hum returns, softer now, almost lost under the fan.

Litia fetches more gauze, cuts it in rough squares. The scissors click like insects. She keeps her head down, pretending to measure. When the hum grows louder, she rinses instruments that don’t need rinsing, letting water hit metal.

Eamon works the last strip of tape. The skin looks fragile as rice paper. The smell hasn’t lessened. He tells himself it’s the infection, not the room, not him.

“You should rest,” he says, voice too low.
“I’m resting.” The old man smiles. “You should too.”

He means it kindly, but it lands wrong. Something under the words, an understanding Eamon doesn’t want.

He changes the subject. “Any fever?”
The man shakes his head. “Cold now. Inside the bones.”
“You need to stay warm.”
“Too late for that.”

The hum comes again. Same three notes. Eamon’s hands stop.
“You remember my father?” he asks.
The man doesn’t answer. His gaze follows a droplet running down the IV line, one after another, until the drip itself feels like time.

Eamon clears his throat. “You remember the river?”
The man’s smile deepens, faint as light on water. “All of them,”

The silence after is long. Rain thickens against the shutters, a steady percussion. Eamon seals the final tape. Too tight. The scissors slip from the tray, clatter to the floor.

He bends to pick them up. His hand shakes once, just enough to betray him.
Litia doesn’t look. She wipes the table again, though it’s already clean.

He sets the scissors back, aligned with the others. “You’ll come again tomorrow.”
“Maybe,” the man says. “If there’s time.”
“There’s time.”
The man chuckles softly. “You sound like your father.”

He sits up, slow. The leg trembles but holds. Litia steps forward to help, but he waves her off. “I walk.”

He does, limping, steady, through the doorway and into the gray afternoon. The sound of the rain swallows him before the next breath.

Eamon stays still. The smell lingers. It’s on his gloves, in his clothes, somewhere beneath his skin.

He turns to the sink. Stands. Opens the tap. Shuts it. Opens it again. The gloves come off with a snap. He washes once. Then again. The water runs pink, then clear, then pink again. He doesn’t stop.

The hum, or the memory of it, still in his ears.

Outside - thunder. The shutters rattle. Inside - the fan ticks. The smell stays.

The hum follows him into sleep.

Rain against a tin roof. The rhythm wrong, too fast, too clean. He drifts off.

He’s back in the mission compound. The air smells of soap boiled too long. His mother at the basin, sleeves rolled, water cloudy. The same motion, over and over. She doesn’t look up.

A bowl on the table. Metal. Empty, then full. The color shifts, clear, then dark. He can’t tell if it’s blood or water.

Someone coughing in the next room. Not loud. More like breathing turned sideways.

He takes a step. The floor softens beneath him. The boards ripple. Each step makes a hollow sound, like knocking on a door no one wants to open.

The humming starts again. Not the old man’s. His mother’s. Same three notes. The same refusal to finish.

He tries to speak. Can’t. The air thickens in his throat.

The bowl trembles. The surface breaks.

He wakes before it spills.

The fan turns above him, throwing slow shadows across the ceiling. Rain still on the roof, steady now.

He reaches for the lamp. Doesn’t turn it on.

Somewhere in the dark, the hum goes on.

Morning breaks close and wet. The gutters overflow before the sun clears the roofs. Eamon leaves the clinic by the back path, stepping over the small river that forms where the drainpipe meets the mud.

The market’s already alive. Radios fight with one another, rugby highlights against gospel hymns. The smell hits early. Diesel, smoke, salt, fruit rotten. Vendors call prices that climb and fall in the same breath.

He slows as he reaches the tables.

Mere is there again, exactly where she was. Hair pinned with a strip of masi. Arms wet to the elbow. She works with a short knife, scraping scales into a bucket, her wrists flashing silver. The boy fans flies with a piece of cardboard.

She glances up. “You again.”

“I was nearby.”

“You always nearby.”

He smiles at that. “Dangerous habit.”

“Expensive one.”

The runoff carries fish scales into the drain. The air smells of seaweed and kerosene. A choir drifts from the church across the road.

She gestures toward the crate. He sits.

She glances at his hands. “They too clean.”

“Hazard of the job.”

“That’s your sickness.”

“Happens to the best of us.”

The boy lingers, grinning.

“Go bring ice before I cut you instead,” Mere says.

He goes, still laughing.

She pushes a fish toward Eamon. “Try again.”

The first scrape does nothing. The scales slide away from the blade. The second catches, slips, tears. The skin gives with a sound that makes his stomach turn. Blood beads along his wrist.

“Better,” she says.

He wipes his hand on his sleeve, then stops himself.

“Tabu,” she says. “Let it dry.”

He looks up. She’s not smiling.

Rain begins again, thin, constant. Vendors pull tarps over the tables, the sound a rough percussion.

They work side by side for a while. He tries to match her rhythm. Can’t. She’s faster, the knife moving as if it already knows the next cut. He’s all hesitation and correction.

A woman two tables over shouts in Fijian. Mere answers, sharp and amused. Everyone laughs. Eamon doesn’t understand a word.

“You miss your place,” she says.

“My place?”

“Your country. Cold one.”

He nods. “Different kind of cold.”

“You talk like you hiding something.”

“Habit.”

“Another sickness?”

He looks at his hands. “Probably.”

The boy returns with a new block of ice, sets it down with a thud. “Doctor baptized again,” he says, seeing Eamon’s wet sleeves.

Mere says something in Fijian. The boy laughs harder, then runs off.

“What’s that song you were humming yesterday?” Eamon asks.

“Old one. From home.”

“Which part?”

“All parts.”

“You dream too much,” she says.

“Hazard of the job again.”

“Dreams not clean things. Better you stay awake.”

“I try.”

“You not good at it.”

She starts on another fish. The knife scrapes, steady, hypnotic.

He watches her hands. She doesn’t nick herself once. He cuts slower, trying to copy the motion. The knife slips, slices the pad of his thumb. A bright bead of red wells up.

She looks over. “See? You clean again.”

He presses his thumb against his palm. “That’s why I’m sick.”

“Maybe.”

She hands him a rag. “Hold that. Or you bleed into my dinner.”

He presses the cloth. “Maybe it needs salt.”

She laughs then, real laughter, sudden and wide. It startles him.

The rain thickens. Water runs in narrow rivers down the center aisle. The tarps sag under the weight. Someone curses when theirs collapses, spilling a cascade onto the fish. Mere doesn’t flinch. She just brushes the water away, resets her knife, keeps going.

Eamon helps where he can, passing paper, folding parcels, trying not to slow her.

For a while they work in silence. Only the scrape of blades, the radios slipping between hymn and commentary. Humming.

“You know that song,” she says.

“Maybe.”

“You people say maybe when you mean yes.”

“Sometimes.”

“Then you should learn to say yes.”

The boy returns, sets a smaller fish on the table. “This one for Litia,” Mere says.

The market hums around them, voices, radios, knives, rain.

Mere cuts another fish. “You people always think too much,” she says.

“Hazard,” he says.

She snorts. “You like repeating yourself.”

“Occupational -”

“No talanoa now.”

He does.

They keep working until the light changes, gray turning thin and yellow. The radio fades to static. The boy drags the bucket of heads toward the drain.

Mere wipes her hands on a rag, looks at him once. “You cut better now.”

He looks at his hands. Red streaks dried brown. The smell clings. “Practice.”

“Not enough.”

She’s already turned away, shouting something to another vendor. He waits a moment longer, then goes.

A rugby cheer cracks from a radio, brief and distant, like thunder arguing with rain. The fish smell follows him up the hill.

Rain has not stopped all evening. It slides down the clinic windows in crooked lines, carrying dust from the roof and the pale remains of insects that never found their way out.

Litia left an hour ago. Her goodbye was half a wave, half apology. He told her to rest. He almost meant it.

The generator coughs once, then steadies. The ceiling fan wobbles in its bearings, ticking like a clock that can’t keep time.

Eamon sits at the desk. Paper damp. Pen heavy. The smell of disinfectant layered over fish, over sweat, over rain. He writes the day’s notes in a hand slipping toward unreadable. Name, temperature, wound, discharge. The old man’s name he writes last, then crosses it out, then writes it again.

Outside, a dog barks twice, then stops.

He listens to the fan. The sound seems to pulse with his breath.

On the counter: the fish from Mere, still wrapped in newspaper, soft with condensation. The ink has bled across the edge of the table, dark smears like maps.

He tells himself to go home. He doesn’t move.

Another cough from the generator. The lights flicker, dim, hold. The clinic shrinks to a tunnel of yellow light and shadow.

Something knocks, one sharp sound, wood on metal. He looks up. Nothing. The air feels thick. He stands, checks the door. The rain hits his face like warm pins.

No one outside. Only the smell of mud and exhaust.

He closes the door and bolts it.

The hum in his ears hasn’t stopped since the old man left. Three uneven notes. Not melody, not even sound, just pressure, like someone humming through bone.

The phone rings.

He freezes. The old rotary one on the wall, almost never ringing after nine.

He lifts it. The line crackles.

A woman’s voice, faint. Not Litia.
“Doctor. You need come.”
“Who is this?”
“The old man. He not breathing good.”
“Where?”
Static. The line hisses, then clicks dead.

He stands a moment with the receiver still in hand, the dial tone flattening to silence.

He opens the paper parcel. Inside, the fish has clouded over, eyes turned to glass. He touches the side of it. Cold as a wrist. He drops it in the bin and wipes his hands.

Outside, thunder rolls far off, the kind that circles instead of striking. He puts on his coat. No umbrella.

The street is almost empty. Water runs in small rivers along the gutters, catching light from the few cars that pass. The market tarps flap like broken sails.

He walks fast. His shoes fill with water. The smell of the fish stalls has turned sour.

At the corner by the church, the boy from the market stands barefoot in the rain, cardboard folded under his arm.

“The old man,” Eamon says. “Where?”

The boy points up the hill. Eamon starts walking. The rain thickens.

Next morning early, back at the clinic. Gray light. The fan still ticking. He sits at the clinic table, shirt damp from the night.

The soap rests beside the sink, thin as paper. He turns the tap once. Cold water sputters, clears. He wets his hands, then leaves them that way. No towel. No drying.

Outside, the rain has broken to mist. The road glistens, patched with puddles that hold the color of tin. The smell of fish reaches him again.

Vendors lift tarps, shake them, tie them back. A radio hums through static, rugby scores, then hymn, then nothing. Diesel mixes with salt. The heat from the ground rises slow.

He passes a woman selling papayas, a man hosing fish blood into the gutter. The water runs pink, then clear, then pink again. A dog noses through vegetable scraps.

Mere is already there. Sleeves rolled, hair damp and pulled back with a strip of cloth. Her wrists slick with scales. The boy stacks ice in a rusted bin, bare feet dark with yesterday’s rain. He sees Eamon, grins once, returns to his work.

She glances up once. “Morning, Doctor.”

He moves towards the crate.

She pushes the crate with her foot. “Sit.”

He sits. The wood still wet from night rain.

She works fast. Knife along spine, twist, pull. The sound clean, practiced. The fish opens like a book. She rinses it, sets it aside, takes another.

He watches her hands. The angle of the blade. Where she presses, where she lets the knife do the work.

She pushes a fish toward him.

He takes the knife. The handle still warm from her grip. He finds the seam, presses. The blade skips once, then catches. He draws it down, not straight, but straighter than before.

“Along,” she says, not looking up.

He adjusts. The knife slips, opens a line of red. The smell folds over them, brine, blood, rain-metal.

She glances at the cut. “Better.”

A customer arrives, older woman in a sulu, shopping bag over her arm. She points at three fish. Mere wraps them, weighs with her hand, names a price. Coins clink. The woman leaves.

Mere returns, picks up her knife. “More,” she says.

They work side by side. Her knife moves fast, steady. His follows slower, the rhythm not quite matched but closer. The scrape of blade on scale, the wet sound of flesh parting. The boy fans flies.

Another fish. Then another. The bucket fills with heads and guts. His white sleeves stained, darken with water and blood. Scales cling to the hairs on his wrists, catch light when he moves.

The boy brings a fresh block of ice, sets it down with a thud that shakes the table. Water spills over the edge. Eamon’s shoes are soaked. He doesn’t look down.

Mere rinses her knife, wipes it once against her hip. She glances at the sky, still gray, the rain holding off but close. Then back to the fish.

He keeps cutting. The motion steadier now. His hands don’t shake.

Rain begins again, soft, close. It beads on their arms, runs down the table edge, pools in the grooves of the wood. The tarps sag slightly. The sound changes, radio fading under the percussion of water on tin.

The boy laughs at nothing, or at the rain, the sound small, harmless.

Eamon’s hands are slick now, rain, blood, scales layered over each other. He reaches for the rag beside the bucket.

Stops.

His hand hovers a moment. He keeps working.

Mere wraps a fillet, ties it with string. She glances at him, his wet hands, his sleeves dark to the elbows, then away. Her face gives nothing. She pushes another fish toward him.

He takes the knife.

Another fish. He presses the blade.