No, we aren’t going fishing.
Yes. Yes, it’s a beautiful day. I can see that. Yes.
But no. We aren’t going fishing.
Fine. Sit down; this won’t take a second. Want a puff? No? Good, this is the expensive shit. Now listen carefully, because I’m not telling you this twice.
***
Fifteen years ago, there was a beautiful day. Big, blue sky. Soft, warm breeze. Friendly currents, singing birds, nice soft morning light.
Yes, it looked a lot like it does now. Congratulations, you’ve found my point. Now shut up.
And on this beautiful day three fishers set their sails and went out, onto the big banks. And they were in good spirits, because it was such a beautiful day and they were young and all their skeletons still worked properly, and so they boasted and bragged and they made a bet. Whoever caught the finest catch that day would receive the aid of the other two in wooing Botty Trugrard.
One to write the poetry and the other to pick flowers.
None of your damned business, that’s how we court around here. Who asked you? LISTEN.
So they all spread out a bit on the banks, so’s nobody could claim the other was stealing their catch, or using their good spot, or whatever and what not. Just on the edge of the horizon – which was a nice big horizon, it being a beautiful clear day. Where they could keep an eye out in case of trouble, or sneaking off to spike your catch with a friend’s haul, or somesuch like that.
In theory. In practice once the nets started weighing and the lines started pulling and the sweat flowed as free as the cusswords there was no time to be spared or mind to be paid to the others, not more than there would be to the flight of passing birds.
Then at day’s end, when the sun dipped down, one of the fishers looked up and the other two boats weren’t there no more.
Credit where credit’s due, she did the right thing. Blamed herself, sailed over, searched and hunted and combed for a scrap of flotsam or jetsam or anything, went home, told everyone, and the whole town turned out and looked all the night.
It was a beautiful night too. Calm waves, smooth soft moonlight. But they didn’t find a thing. Not one, solitary thing.
***
So the fisher who’d done the right thing was sad, and was cheered up, and one of the people cheering her up was Botty Trugrard so they got married after that and had three kids and everything was just peachy until thirteen years later, when the sun climbed over the horizon nice and smoothly and shone on the most beautiful day those three kids had ever seen, and the second-most-so their mothers had noticed.
It also shone on the second fisher, who was bobbing in the surf just off the dock.
It took six days of feeding on bread and fish and water before that second fisher’s eyelids cracked open. Six months before her mouth worked. And a year after that before the whole story came out.
***
It had been a beautiful day, and the second fisher had felt good about her chances. She’d found this spot the week before, she’d come up with the bet around then, she’d dropped it into conversation that morning.
Never start a bet that isn’t a sure thing, that’s what she said.
So she was whistling a lot, and because she was whistling a lot she didn’t hear the sound until it was too late, which was just as well really because there wasn’t one thing she could’ve done about it when the line came down from the sun.
It flickered, the light splashed, and she was being hauled up, into the light, faster than thinking, surer than breathing, water dripping down past the clouds off the hull of her boat as she was whisked up into the air and the hands of the sun closed around her boat, too bright to look at and impossibly huge.
The sun pulled her off the line and threw her into the bottom of its boat, which was the sky. From up here the clouds were still soft and fluffy, but they were also iron-hard and held the second fisher’s boat as surely as iron.
The sun turned away, then whisked up its net and with a slosh the third fisher’s boat fell into its burning palms. It weighed it carefully, shook its head, and then snapped the boat in half with a quick jerk.
This was when the second fisherman slid out of her boat and began to run, and it was just in time too because not five big gulping breaths later the sun reached down and snapped her boat in half like the third fisher’s.
She counted them, from the shadow of the bilge. Very carefully. Five breaths exactly.
Time became hard after that. The hours were too bright, the minutes too harsh. There was a day and it was One Day and it hung overhead like a hammer as the second fisher slipped, inch by inch, footstep by footstep, cower by cower, towards the gunwales.
At last it was one jump. Just one jump, but it was a little too fast, and the sun’s hand almost quick enough. The burn sank deep into the bone, and then the fall came, and the gentle wash of waves at the edge of the docks.
***
And that’s why we don’t go fishing on beautiful days. Because I told them all about it. Now be a dear and fuck off; it’s too nice out to put up with you.