The port smells like diesel and salt and something charring on a grill made from an old oil drum. I sit on a plastic stool that wobbles if I lean the wrong way. Nobody warns you. You learn.
The man cooking sardines has done this every day for longer than I have been alive, probably. He does not look up when I sit down. He just adds another handful of fish to the grill, small silver things that curl and spit and blacken at the edges. Behind him the boats are blue and green and peeling, tied loose, knocking against each other with the swell. Gulls work the air above them like they are paid by the hour.
Bread comes first, torn by hand because there is no knife, and I do not ask for one. Then the sardines on a tin plate, too hot to touch, and I burn my fingers anyway. Bones and all, someone tells me later. I did not ask. The beer is cold enough to fog the glass, and condensation runs down onto the table, onto the wood worn smooth by a thousand other elbows.
There is a rhythm to this place. The muezzin somewhere behind me, the slap of rope against a mast, a kid running past with a football that used to be white. Nobody performs for anyone here. The fishermen mending nets do not care that I am watching. The Atlantic definitely does not care. It just keeps doing what it does, throwing itself at the wall of the medina, over and over, patient in a way I am not.
I think of my father, oddly. He does not eat fish with his hands. He would sit here stiff-backed, asking for a fork, missing the point entirely. My mother would have her shoes off already, feet in the spray, laughing at him. I carry both of them around without meaning to. Funny how a plate of sardines can do that.
The camera stays in the bag for most of it. Some light you eat instead of shoot, and this is that kind, gold going soft, sitting low over the water like it is tired too. I take one frame before the sun drops, just the boats and the wet dark stones and a single gull mid-flight, out of focus, uninterested in being famous.
Bones, bread crumbs, an empty glass. The bill written in pencil on a scrap of paper. This is dinner. This is enough.
