The Day Fisherman

The sun is a weight today, wide and oppressing, pressing into the back of the fisherman’s neck as he drifts across a lake that refuses to move. The surface is too calm, too reflective, like it’s waiting for him to admit something that he’s avoided for years. He cuts small wounds into the water with the boat’s slow crawl, a ripple, fishing lines trailing behind him like obligations he forgot to leave on shore.

The fish stay hidden, at ease, underwater. They know when a man brings more loneliness than bait. Hours pass. The silence compounds. The downriggers drag their heavy purpose through a world that simply isn’t interested. He swaps lures, checks the hooks, keeps pretending this is just bad luck, but he can feel the truth rising from the cold layers below: he has outwaited himself.

The shoreline sits on the horizon like a quiet escape route. He considers it longer than he should. The thought of giving up isn’t dramatic, just honest. He leans back in the seat and lets the day take the wheel. The sun shifts. The world stays indifferent.

When the sky thickens into evening and he finally begins reeling in his lines, one comes alive. A violent pull. A sudden reminder that something out there still wants to fight. But half the lines are still out, and the deck becomes a trap of crossed nylon and clattering metal. He scrambles. He slips. His head meets the deck floor with the dull thud of something being returned to the earth.

He lies there, bleeding in a widening shape that looks almost peaceful. The rod still jerks beside him, the fish working through the tangle as if trying to free itself from the story entirely. He watches the sky darken into a field of early stars, and for a moment he feels the strange relief of being done with the day, done with the trying, done with the quiet failures he never spoke aloud.

His breath softens. His eyes track one last constellation he can’t name. And then something inside him lets go without ceremony.

The line goes slack.

The fish slips back into its unseen world.

And the lake returns to its silence, as if nothing happened at all.