The Fisherman

by John Langan

Some things are so bad that just to have been near them taints you, leaves a spot of badness in your soul like a bare patch in the forest where nothing will grow. Do you suppose a story can carry away such badness? It seems a bit much to hope for, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s true for the little wrongs, you know, the kind of minor frustrations that you’re able to turn into funny stories at parties. For what happened at the Creek, though, I doubt there’s such a transformation waiting. There’s only transmission.

once we’d gone our separate ways, everything seemed a bit less bright than it had while we were sitting together.

I don’t know if, deep down, all stories of falling in love are the same.

The world’s always seemed a pretty big place to me, full of more things than any one body could know, and I’d be the last person to pretend to understand it all.

It’s hard to hold onto any tragedies that aren’t your own for very long.

His grief had taken him far into a country whose borders are all most folks ever see, and from where he was, caught up in that dark land’s customs and concerns, what I was worrying over sounded so foreign I might as well have been speaking another language.

Certainly, she’ll haunt the dreams of one man who witnesses her stroll with Cornelius, a minor painter named Otto Schalken, who’s up from Brooklyn visiting his brother Paul, the schoolmaster in West Hurley.

but people’s memories are short for any sorrow that isn’t theirs,

This accent is what you’d imagine if an animal learned how to speak, something that wasn’t trying to master your particular language, but the idea of language itself.

The children, though – whom I guess you’d have to call orphans, despite the fact that their mother was up and moving around

I am what I’ve become, and you – you’ve gone back to fishing, haven’t you? With that family next door, that cute little girl. Not much chance of her trying to sacrifice you to an undying wizard, is there?’