fishhook

When I was young I fished with my family. Packing up our gear and heading out before sunrise, we’d drive to some point on that strange strip of gulf shore that lay between Home and Galveston and set up shop on an empty pier, spending the day reeling in catches.

Thinking back on those days, I wonder what it was like for them. Calling those murky waters home, a world imaginable only to those senses unimaginable. Following your appetite only to come across the bait and the hook. Is it the worm that tempted, the enticement of an easy meal in a world where such is hard to come by? Or perhaps the allure of a lure, shining with color, concealing with beauty a fatal truth.

One way or another a fish finds itself on the end of a hook, and while for us the experience is sport, little is ever said of how it may seem for them. Maybe its revelation both terrible and terrific. First, satisfaction at the capture of a treasure. A clamp of the jaws and a moment of success lasting only as long as a moment can before it is no longer anything. Then the sharp pain of the hook. The reeling in. The struggle.

Hanging under the weight of its body by the hook in the mouth, the fish bursts into the cosmos. A space unbreathing, gills struggling for air as eyes bulge as body thrashes in futile attempt at escape as, as, as all the while, as the fishhook buries itself deeper, as ripped from the jaw. Then, only blood. Through all this the fish doesn’t speak. Nothing there but silent gasping. Moments dragged out to eternity.

At this point, we would take the larger of the fish and drop them in the ice box to be eaten later. I know of their fate. They, as soon as they are brought into this bright and breathless world, are cast into abyss. Airless still, but dark now too. And so cold. Theirs is an ending of slow fading into nothing.

The fish we toss back into the gulf, they interest me more. I wonder what it’s like for them, to be tempted by a lie that brings them to the brink of death then back again. The disorientation of it all, the airlessness, the return to familiar waters. But different now. Maimed for one, maybe even near-dead. But not dead. But alive. But what then? Are they able to return to their old habits and haunts, or is all too different now? Do they warn others of the temptation of the bait and its curved secret?

I imagine the fish growing bitter as it witnesses comrades chase that same fate, whisked up and never seen again. Perhaps the helplessness is too much for it to handle, and it wishes to fade away with the rest. A rare case, maybe, but maybe why, in rare cases, we would reel the same catch twice, and release it twice.