The Fisherman

by John Langan

If what’s around us is a picture, then this is what it’s drawn on. Reverend Mapple had a word for it, the subjectile. Lottie said it was like, if you could cut a hole in the air, black water would come pouring out of it.

There’s a flash of light – only, Jacob will tell Lottie, it was black light, momentary dark instead of momentary bright.

There is so much of it that its very presence presses on Jacob, as if mere proximity to it might be sufficient to snuff him out, like a candle in a hurricane.

Lottie will be swept by the certainty that this is the dream. This life in which she left her home for a country whose language has never felt right on her tongue, where she once stood face to face with a woman who had been dead, where she married and bore children to a shy man from Austria who expressed himself more elegantly through the work of his hands than through his speech: it’s all the invention, the yield of an adolescent imagination desperate for experience. If only she could find her way back to the blank space that borders dreaming and remain there long enough to navigate its grey emptiness, then the next time she opens her eyes, it will be to Clara calling her to come downstairs to kiss her father before he’s off to the university.

This was no river; it was an ocean forcing its way through a canal.

There was no emotion in it. What streamed from the enormous eye was either so deep below or so high above any discrete sentiment as to be unrecognizable as such. 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. Imprisoned, but not separated, it was the black ocean, and the pale creatures grasping the lines that held it,