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As with many unfortunate incidents in Bruno's life, this one started with a dead fish.
Or, rather, dead fish. Plural.
This is an important distinction to note, because it will come up repeatedly and without warning, rather like the smell of dead fish themselves.
Unlike Señora Pezmuerto's goldfish, these fish did not come to him dead on a tablet. They came to him dead on a plate. Admittedly, both were still green.
"I don't understand why you're making me eat this."
He poked it. It moved. He was unclear as to whether this was because it was still alive or because he had poked it. One of life's little mysteries.
Antonio could answer for him, but he was concerned he would learn more things he'd rather not. For example, did you know if you cut a worm in half, both halves could then scream? Bruno did now, thanks to the miracle and one very adorable nephew that he was very concerned about.
"Because you need to try new things, tío. You spent a long time away, you need to expand your horizons a little."
"What's this?" What it was was worthy of suspicion. He started to peel it off; clearly, it had been left there by mistake.
Mirabel slapped his hand. "That's nori, you're supposed to eat it."
"Did it know it was going to get flattened and wrapped around the sushi like this? Actually, no, I don't want to know." He leaned over to whisper in her ear. "Did you hear Antonio talking about the bugs on the way over?"
"Everybody heard about the bugs."
In fulfilling its purpose of solving the little mysteries of the universe one-by-one, the miracle had answered a question nobody asked: can bugs scream?
The answer was yes, but that it was so quiet it was easy to tune out.
Life's little mysteries, answered with its absolute littlest voices as they cried out in agony.
"And it's not an animal." She folded the green thing back around the rice. "It's seaweed. It's good! Try it."
"We're... eating weeds now?"
"Mirabel, if you don't make him eat a piece of sushi then I'm going to make him choke on one."
"You could just choke me with the seaweed," Bruno suggested, peeling it off again to inspect. He narrowed his eyes. "Isa, is it this flat when it's in the ocean?"
"Mirabel."
"I'm trying!" she hissed. "It was hard enough to convince him to come here in the first place!"
"I don't like fish."
"Tío, we just ate fish last night."
"On a personal level," he clarified, folding his arms over his chest.
"Wow, you had a lot of time to stew over that in the walls, huh?" Camilo had already wolfed down half his plate, which didn't convince Bruno to try his own at all, given that he knew the sorts of things Camilo found palatable on average.
"In the walls?" Pepa snorted. "Try since he was seven."
"Which made it more traumatizing!"
"What's traumatizing is that it was living in a bowl," Luisa said with a shudder, giving an uncomfortable look to Antonio. Everyone else followed her lead, recalling his cheerful discussion of that very subject last week, which had ruined everyone's appetite for breakfast faster than any other topic ever brought up at the table. Again, rather like a dead fish itself, the horror lingered, also ruining their appetites for lunch. And dinner. And, once, for punch that Julieta had made the mistake of serving in a fishbowl, as a joke.
One of life's little mysteries, trapped with no filtration system.
That same mystery made Bruno think that Antonio would probably need a lot of therapy when he grew up.
"I have a bad track record with fish. I don't trust fish. I only came here because you said all the fish would already be dead before we got here." He flapped his hands at the restaurant at large, ready to fend for himself in case any flying fish came for him. "And I don't even see any fish!"
"You've got a couple fishes there on your plate," Camilo said with his mouth full, very helpfully jabbing his finger directly into a piece of Bruno's sushi. "Right there, to be exact."
"Fish."
"Yup, that's what I –"
"No, it's 'fish'. You said 'fishes'."
"That's the plural of fish."
The boy knew the word plural, but not as it related to fish. A mystery even the miracle couldn't answer.
"The plural of fish is fish."
"The plural of fish is fish." He settled back in his chair. "And fishes."
"That's – that's ridiculous!"
"No it's not." He pointed his way through the entrails of Bruno's picked apart rolls. "You've got salmon, and tuna, and eel."
“Eels are fish?" he whispered to Mirabel.
"Ask Antonio!"
"No! I'm afraid he's going to tell me that they're fish with families." He grimaced when he saw Antonio nodding out of the corner of his eye. Eek. To la familia anguila! And their tiny, tiny anguish.
"Those are fishes on your plate, Bruno," Camilo interrupted.
If you picked the ‘EL’ out of the middle of ‘EELS’ the same way that Bruno had picked the eels themselves out of the roll, you'd be left with the single most offensive letters Bruno had seen all day. "Fish! They're FISH, not fishES."
Camilo pointed to his own plate, sliding his hand over a salmon roll like he was Vanna White, which was a reference Bruno had been banned from making until Vanna White herself had at least been born. "Fish." He waved his hand over a salmon roll and a tuna roll. God, Vanna White was only what, seven years away? Eight? And then Wheel of Fortune was like thirty – "Fishes."
With the animus only accessible by someone experiencing moral outrage about grammar as it related to animals, Bruno whipped his head around to the rest of the table, gesturing at Camilo like he just said the plural of 'tío' was 'idiots'. "I mean, are you hearing this? How is he passing school? It's a four-letter word!"
"I know a few other four-letter words if you'd like to hear them, Tío Bruno."
The remaining Madrigals avoided making eye contact, suddenly preoccupied with their own fish. (Not fishes.) Not only was nobody on his side, they had also taken all the other sides with them, so that nobody could accidentally end up in his corner, either.
Camilo and Bruno were prone to fights like this, that were boisterous and indignant and any of the other fancy synonyms for 'irritating' that Bruno could pull out of his battered thesaurus. In other words: stupid ones.
"Fish." Bruno jabbed a finger at one piece, then popped it into his mouth and swallowed it. "I just ate a fish." He ate another piece. "I just ate fish. Plural."
Grammar. Grammar was the secret to tricking Tío Bruno into eating sushi. If they had known this an hour and a half ago, Mirabel wouldn't have had to explain the difference between krab and crab in nauseating detail.
(That difference, by the way, being that Antonio could only hear one of them scream, because the other had already been prepared before it was delivered to the restaurant.)
(One of life's little mysteries, ground up and compressed into an artificially dyed stick of screams that at least stopped before they got to his nephew.)
(Another of life's little mysteries, which the miracle refused to comment on: how did his nephew know the stick could scream if the screams were supposed to have stopped before they made it to the Encanto?)
"You're right, you just ate fish. Plural." Camilo ate another piece himself. "Kind of, I think that might actually be all from the same fish –"
Félix shushed Antonio before he could provide any more helpful – and horrifying – clarification.
"Thank you for seeing sense." He turned back to his half-naked sushi, which had probably been robbed of more dignity by inspiring an argument about grammar than it had been by Bruno undressing it.
Huh. An unusually quick ceasefire for a Bruno and Camilo argument. If left to their own devices, they could usually drag their arguments out for days and dredge them up from places unknown at the slightest provocation. Not only that, but their arguments usually permeated every other activity in Casita, with no one save a priest able to clear them from the house.
Again, rather like dead fish themselves, if left to their own devices too long in the back of the refrigerator.
Bruno, however, had become preoccupied with expanding his palate, even if it did involve far too much enthusiastic discussion about how emotionally attached fish were to their roe while he ate. (The answer, thank God, was not very.)
Sushi: actually not that bad. Bruno ate a few more pieces from a different roll.
"And now you've eaten fishes."
A lifetime of exposure had immunized Camilo against glares.
"No!” Bruno punched a single indignant finger into the air with such force that he nearly knocked himself out of his chair. “I ate fish!"
"Fishes."
Bruno exploded, which is to say that he began to shovel a lot of pieces of sushi into his mouth at once. Aside from his admitted lifelong grudge against the creatures, it was unclear why he selected this tactic. If eating some fish hadn't already demonstrated his point, choking to death on even more fish certainly wouldn't bolster his argument.
He jabbed a finger at his empty plate and declared with his not-empty mouth, "Fith!"
Camilo twisted into one of his most gruesome-looking Brunos yet: an exact replica of the one sitting across from him at the table. "Fithes."
Bruno was stewing about this more than the fish stewing in a pot on the stove downstairs at that very moment.
Yes, Julieta thought she was funny.
And yes, she was right.
But how could Camilo insist on something so absurd? Everyone knew the plural of fish was fish. And of all people, who was more of an authority on the subject of fish than Bruno himself? He'd had beef with the creatures for the vast majority of his life. After all, had it not been Sun Tzu himself who said, "Know thy enemy?"
Enemy might not have been in its plural form in that declaration, but Bruno was confident the man knew his enemies as well.
After the loud opening arguments in the case of Fish v. Fishes, things quieted down in Casita.
This was because Bruno and Camilo learned to mouth the words at one another when Abuela wasn't looking instead.
Bruno had learned enough in life to know that when you put fish and fish together, what you got was a school. And he fully intended to school his nephew by any means necessary.
His original thought process had been ingenious: who could possibly know more about fish than the boy who could talk to them?
However, his updated thought process was far more grounded in reality: who could possibly know less about grammar than a five-year-old?
This realization only occurred to him in the middle of the conversation, and much in the same way that a bear occurs to a salmon: painfully, and just when he thought he had been getting somewhere.
"Wait, Toñito, I'm not asking you –"
"There's Carlos, and Chepe, and Inigo, and –"
"When I wanted to know what fish call themselves –"
"– Luís, and Soledad, and María, and Manuela –"
"I didn't want such specific examples, papito –"
The accusation froze Antonio's recital of the fish phonebook. Finbook? Bruno would have to save that one for later. "What do you mean, 'specific'? What could be less specific than that?"
"Uh – just about anything, buddy. Do – do you know what specific means? It's a big word."
"And Camilo taught it to me!" Okay, so he definitely didn't know what it meant. But Antonio folded his arms in righteous indignation – making him look quite a bit like Bruno himself, actually – and declared, "I didn't even tell you any of their middle or last names!"
Just like fish in a school, they rapidly began going in circles. Yes, Antonio certainly knew many things about fish, but he also thought that the best word to refer to a group of them was "friends", which wasn't quite the answer Bruno had been hoping for.
Antonio? Who needed Antonio?
(Don't tell Antonio he said that.)
(He needed Antonio.)
(Just not as an expert witness in the case of Fish v. Fishes.)
Sure, the boy was a subject matter expert on the intimate personal lives of fish, but this wasn't a matter of ichthyology (or ichthyopsychology). This was a matter of grammar, a far more dangerous science. Where ichthyology challenged one to understand fish, grammar challenged one to write about fish well enough that they didn't look stupid when they submitted the paper to a scientific journal, which was far more difficult.
And the dangers of proper grammar couldn't be understated. Proper grammar was a beast which tended to violently injure unprepared investigators by splitting their infinitives in twain, or by asking them to use semicolons correctly; in a sentence. God forbid, one be tasked with using, an appropriate number of commas. Not to mention, avoiding passive voice was something even the most well-studied of wordsmiths were unable to do. And starting a sentence properly? A dangerous activity even the best of times.
Even avoiding a run-on sentence, truthfully something of a simple task for most, could trip someone up if they weren't careful, and when they were allowed to run off with a sentence there was no stopping those horrid things they loved to crash right into the middle of any well-meaning argument and mash it all together like the fish they ground up and used to make the screaming sticks of imitation krab.
The ink of the editor's pen was red for a reason, after all.
No, Bruno would have to rely on other, more credible sources if he wanted any chance at winning this case. And one night, while reading bedtime stories to Antonio, he found one: a book written by none other than a doctor, one of the single most venerated professions there is. And this particular doctor not only had an opinion in the matter of Fish v. Fishes, but had also written something of a treatise on the subject.
That man's name was Dr. Seuss, and that treatise was a little novella by the name of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.
And the good doctor agreed: the plural of fish was fish.
A problem arose: Camilo was familiar with the piece, as well as Dr. Seuss's other philosophical works, such as Green Eggs and Ham and The Cat in the Hat.
Bruno didn't see the problem. Green Eggs and Ham was a riveting meditation on the limitations of not liking the color green. The Cat in the Hat? An intense exploration of the theme of man versus nature, namely regarding the sorts of crimes cats might get up to if someone forced them to wear clothes.
"Here, Bruno, I'll make this easy for you." Camilo plucked the book from Bruno's hands and opened it with a flourish. "One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. And when you put them all together, they are fishes."
"No," Bruno insisted as he snatched the book back and flipped to the next page. "Look, right here! 'Say! what a lot of fish there are'." He held up his proof for Camilo's inspection.
His sobrino's smirk was not what one would call promising. "It also says 'this one has a little car'. You ever met a fish with a car, tío?"
Damned Dr. Seuss, always making things up.
"You'll have to ask Antonio," he sniffed, tucking the book under his arm. "But I'm sure he'll say that he's met a lot of fish, and that none of them have cars."
"Oh, I know a fish with a car!"
There were many little mysteries in life, and the miracle allowed them to behold some of the more interesting ones.
"See? Fish – wait, what?"
He and Camilo looked at one another, derailed from their argument by a new mystery of the universe: how did a combustion engine work underwater?
Or at least, that was Bruno's question. Camilo wanted to know whether the car still had windshield wipers.
"Sure. Juancho put a little toy car in his fish's tank. It's cute!"
Two more mysteries answered by the miracle: it didn't, and it didn't.
Bruno insisted that Antonio clarify this point: Juancho only had one fish, therefore his use of fish's was possessive, not plural.
He also insisted on another clarification, for everyone's sake: Juancho's fish didn't live in a bowl. Thank God.
No fish deserved that, plural, possessive, or otherwise.
They simply needed to find a subject matter expert. Preferably one on Bruno's side, and with non-faked credentials, unlike that fraud "Dr." Seuss.
Luckily, thanks to the miracle, they had access to masters of a wide variety of subjects just down the hall. They just had to figure out which master was the most appropriate to ask. Bruno, master of the premonitory sciences. Also the plaintiff in the case. Out.
Pepa, master of meteorology. She had also tried her hand at seismology. And, once, after Bruno accidentally dropped a rat on her date, volcanology. Somewhat likely to murder the plaintiff. Also mother of the defendant. Out.
Julieta, master of matters both culinary and corporeal. Thanks to recipes with long stories before they got to any of the good parts, also someone with a bad tendency to skip over text she found boring. And less concerned about whether the fish were plural vs singular than she was about how many were in a serving. Out.
Antonio, master of all branches of zoology save for ichthyology, about which he sadly knew nothing. Out.
Luisa, master of –
"Are you gonna sit there with that dumb look on your face forever or are you gonna admit that you need to go read the dictionary?"
Camilo, master of being the single most irritating boy to ever live.
"I don't need a dictionary, we need a tie-breaker. Or you can just admit that you're wrong."
It might've been a while since Bruno had actually looked in a dictionary. He only had access to a thesaurus in the walls, which was really the only thing someone who was both selcouth and a little melodramatic needed anyway.
"Do you even know what a dictionary is for? Anybody who we ask for a tie-breaker is just going to get the dictionary."
"I don't trust that you're not going to tamper with it somehow!"
"Tamper with it?"
For someone who hadn't so much as glanced at a dictionary in ten years, he certainly had a lot of creatively worded things to say about it. As tended to happen when any essay was left unsupervised in the presence of a thesaurus, most of these words were just to the left of being quite right, a bit like the difference between a lion and a lionfish.
"Fiddle! Meddle! Manipulate it, distort it, rig it! Tinker, monkey around, pry and poke and butt in! Doctor it!" And doctor it worse than that fraud "Dr." Theodor Seuss Geisel had doctored his qualifications.
Camilo threw his hands up. "How am I going to tamper with a dictionary, Bruno?"
Well that was certainly an uncouth response. Impropriety of the highest degree, really. Downright plebian, if you asked him.
"You could put the word 'fishes' in it,” he sniffed.
"And how is getting someone else to read it going to change the fact that the word 'fishes' is in the dictionary?"
"They'll realize how insane that is," he declared with all the confidence of a fish putting a hook in its mouth, "and they'll have no choice but to agree with me."
Camilo folded his arms and cocked a hip to the side. "Look, I am willing to admit that the plural of fish is fish."
The posture was suspicious, but Bruno would accept the terms of surrender anyway. "Now was that so –"
"But it's also fishes."
Trickery! Chicanery! The sheer duplicity of it all!
"I demand –!" Oh, not a recount, unless recounting the number of letters that were supposed to be in the word fell under the technical definition of recount. Bruno wouldn't know: no dictionary, remember?
But you know what? It felt right, and based on the way the phrase "context clues" had been described to him in school, that was half the battle when it came to using vocabulary words properly. "I demand a recount!"
"Fine. We can get a tie-breaker."
Camilo knew his uncle was going to learn just how many fishes could fit in a school. You see, his sobrino understood the critical difference between a thesaurus and a dictionary: one will give you an awful lot of ways to say the wrong thing, and the other will beat you about the head an awful lot of times until you learned to say the right one.
There was only one person who could possibly provide the deciding opinion in the case of Fish v. Fishes. After all, this was a delicate matter, with lives in the balance: the decision in this case would send one party belly-up, to be scooped from the tank and flushed forever down the grammatical toilet.
No, the fate of all aquatic life on earth, plus the dignity of two non-aquatic men, hung in the balance. To be the arbiter for such a critical mission required a discerning eye, as well as a certain amount of favoritism for a certain only son. And if anyone was a master of the inherent dignity of grammar, it was one Alma Madrigal. A woman so dignified that surely her picture was in the dictionary itself, right next to the entry for "grammatically-correct-about-fish".
Bruno wasn't sure whether that was actually in the dictionary. Remember: thesaurus. However, if it wasn't, it should've been.
The miracle had bestowed unto her the great responsibility of settling all arguments between Bruno and Camilo, namely because she was the only one with a stern enough tone of voice to convince them to quit arguing and go pull out a damned dictionary already. Like all of the miracle's gifts, this one shouldered her with a burden: watching her son and grandson hit rock bottom, and then realizing that they intended to dig.
She looked at the pair of them rather like they were fish themselves. Dead ones, forcing her to read a dictionary while they stunk up her living room.
She skimmed the entry for fish and sighed, wondering how the miracle had managed to bring her to this moment. Her son was a miracle, she had to remind herself, and so was her grandson.
And the miracle is you, she told herself. You haven't killed any of them yet, and that's a separate miracle entirely.
Truly, the most miraculous thing about the both of them was that they could manage to breathe and remain conscious at the same time, but there were some mysteries even the miracle couldn't answer.
Her glare over the edge of the page was, at the very least, a loving one. "The correct plural is fish."
"I told you, Camilo –"
"And fishes."
"What?!" Bruno stole the book from his mother and poured over the entry, proving to her once and for all that he was literate, and therefore had absolutely no reason to call her there to read a dictionary entry for him.
Camilo cackled and did a jaunty little spin.
"I keep telling you! Multiple fish of the same species are fish, multiple fish of different species are fishes!"
"How did you know that? That's ridiculous! What kind of word has two plurals!?"
He flipped into Antonio. "Maybe Antonio can find some cows and ask them to get the other cattle to help explain it to you?" And now Félix – the little one that Camilo only pulled out when he was too weighed down by self-satisfaction to reach Félix's full height. "Or perhaps we can find your brothers-in-law and ask them about the history of our Colombian brethren?" A startlingly graceful spin into Isa. "Or Isa can tell us about the cactuses in her room and her cacti in the front yard and all the cactus she's growing out back?" Impressive, that word had three plurals.
Bruno flapped his mouth open and shut – yes, rather like a fish, though one still in the process of dying, which arguably was a better reflection of his current emotional state anyway. "What is happening right now? It's like you sit around and read the dictionary for fun!"
Camilo didn't answer, but only because he was preparing to help Bruno complete the transition from red fish to blue fish.
He gasped. "You do, don't you?"
And what a transition it was: that monster turned into an exact copy of Bruno, so he could see exactly how stupid he looked right now.
"I want to clarify that I didn't do it for fun." With a flourish and a twist, he changed into something even more gruesome: himself. "But they make me write out dictionary entries when I get in trouble at school. I've probably written out that whole thing five or six times now."
Fishes. One of life's little mysteries, wrapped up in seaweed and all of Bruno's dignity.