The Fisherman

by John Langan

She wasn’t much of a drinker, but she’d learned that if she carried an open bottle of beer with her, she could appear social.

each day that passed was another reminder of how far away I was from her.

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.

But there are some things, no matter if they’re true, you can’t live with them. You have to refuse them. You turn your eyes away from whatever’s squatting right there in front of you and not only pretend it isn’t there now, but that you never saw it in the first place. You do so because your soul is a frail thing that can’t stand the blast-furnace heat of revelation, and truth be damned.

My heart—I could not feel my heart, nor the emotion gripping it. What I felt was too big—it was as if it were outside me, a current that had swept me up and was rushing me along.

For the longest time, talking about her—thinking about her—was an exercise in agony, because I couldn’t separate my wife from the fact of her death. Then, gradually, that stopped being the case. My memory relaxed its grip on Marie’s death; although it felt more as if her dying loosened its hold on me.