Oceans
2007
Published in ARNA, Journal of The University of Sydney Arts Students Society, 2008
1st Prize Winner, The University of Sydney PALM Awards in Literature
Enquiries for full text welcome.
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“Once I caught a fish that could talk,” my father declared to me.
“You did not!” We were in the new furnace room of our new house, stacking old books into new plastic tubs we bought at Wal-Mart, to stop the water damage. Max was sitting in the hallway. The light from the bay windows of the first floor was blue in his hair. He was seven. I was ten.
“Yes, yes I did.” He set a tub marked “Crafts” in sharpie marker on top of another marked “Children.” The tubs were nearing the ceiling now. “Six summers ago, on the Nancy Anne before we sold her. With Clyde.”
“Clyde?”
“Yes indeed, you can ask him when he comes for Christmas Eve. It’s late one night, and we’re heading back to Sitka, that’s in southeast Alaska, dawdling because the sea’s like blue glass and the stars are coming out. The nets are packed, no more big hauls for the day, everything stowed, and for some reason Clyde just gets the urge to drop a line in the water, just for fun.” He picked Robinson Crusoe from where I’d put it in another box marked “Children” and moved it to “Adventure.”
“Except, Clyde’s at the helm and he’s supposed to be on it until we’re back in. He asked me to switch with him, but I said no. So he asked me to drop a line in for him, and he’d get to it later on. I pulled up his old pole from behind the head door, strung it with a bit of herring I was cooking, and tossed it over, and I was going to walk away. But just like that,” he snapped his fingers, “the line’s tight and it felt like the whole boat’d jumped over. Almost pulled the thing right out of my hands, but I held on and I got the line back in, and it was crackling like a sea dragon was on the other end.”
“What’s a sea dragon?” My brother had moved from the hallway and was sitting on one of my teetering stacks of books.
“Big thing. Lots of scales. Breathes bubbles. Anyway, finally I fight this fish onto deck, and I was expecting it to be a tuna as big as one of you, but it’s not. It’s a little thing, silver bellied salmon no bigger than my forearm. I scoop it up with the net and plop it in a bucket, but it jumps right out again, so I go after it again and manage to stick it between the net and my hand, and that’s when it talked!”
“It did not!”
“Yes it did. It sounded all rushy, like it was very very tired, and it said, ‘Let me up.’ And I was so startled I jumped right back, but it was still all tangled up in the net and it lay there, looking at me, and it kept talking. ‘Put me back over the side,’ it said, ‘and I’ll give you something.’ By then I was thinking I’d been hit on the head with a flying oar, but I came over to it, and I picked up the net it was curled in, so that it untangled and lay easy. ‘Thanks,’ it said. ‘Now throw me over.’ But I was thinking, this could be a good chance for me to learn a little something about ocean life, so I asked it where it was from. It just kept looking at me, and then it made a little bubbling noise like a sigh. And it said ‘Tomorrow you will go beyond the second reef to the point where the rocks form a star, and there you will make a great catch. And now, you will put your hand under my right gill, and you will find a present there for your wife.’”
“What -” but he put up a hand, and my brother hushed.
“So I did, and I felt something cold, and out dropped a heavy gold bracelet. I figured, that was good enough for me, so I took him to the side and flipped him over, and he sank like a little silver stone. That’s when Clyde hit the gap in the breakwater, and he came down to check the line, but I told him I’d caught a little baby salmon and threw it back just then. And when I came back at the end of the summer, I gave that bracelet to your mom, and she still wears it every day.”
“Did you go back to the star rock place the next day?”
He smiled at me, and began stacking tubs again. “You know, we did, but we didn’t catch a thing. Totally dead day. I figure that fish was a liar.”
