The Fisherman

by John Langan

It was, you might say, a cold February in my soul. And then one morning my eyes pop open and waiting for me is this thought, I need to go fishing.

With each year that passed, I came to ask myself if Marie might not have gone out of this world so much as gone more deeply into it. From being wrapped up in earth, maybe she’d made her way out into it, into the soil, the water, until she was part of things. Maybe she’d found a way to lead me back to her.

She’s tried to make of her soul a garden, so to speak, but the other-her’s words dig into the soil and overturn it, exposing what is wet and wriggling there to the light of day.

What Lottie is experiencing, however, is more than just a pious, sheltered girl’s realizing her own impure thoughts. She’s undergoing a recognition – a recognition of intent so intense it’s for all practical purposes equivalent to having committed the acts themselves. The ground has fallen out from underneath her. She realizes that the words her other-self is saying are coming from her mouth, too.

I’d told myself that fishing was an oasis for him, a place of respite from the desert of his days. Now, pushing up this steep hill, I wondered if I’d been wrong, if the scorched ruin of his life had swept over his refuge, burying its sweet water under burning sand.

There was only absence, a void as big and grand as everything. It wasn’t white, or black; it wasn’t anything. Perfect in its nothingness, its nullity, it had been contravened, somehow, sundered, confined to the form before me.