Author’s Note:

Fisherman

This story is actually a relic from back when this website was a collection of my self-published (and often grossly mediocre) creative non-fiction stories, only a relic that’s had all the gunk cleaned off, a fresh layer of paint and varnish slathered on, and some dramatic mood lighting cast upon it as it perches on a hand-sculpted pedestal behind a red velvet rope that probably cost roughly forty-six times the artifact’s actual worth. The original piece was called “Slippery Beasts” (linked here), a mostly sunny piece that only highlighted its lingering shadows—or, so I’d intended. In reality, after I published the original, I wasn’t really sure I’d captured the story’s deeper, more ominous meaning. I didn’t think that I’d even grasped what that meaning was, and I’d been the one who’d lived through it.

So letting it age for a year or two, I took another look at the story, the darker themes thrown into even higher contrast for the time that had passed. This time, I got a much better idea for what lurked inside them. I finished the final draft, sent it off, even managed to get it published (this time at a journal with significantly better quality control).

Still, though. I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something there, hidden in the story’s shadowy corners, that I still can’t quite make out. I’m working on another rewrite. We’ll see what comes out of it. What reaches out to pull us in.