It starts with still water.
The quiet of a windless morning on a pixel sea. I cast lines off the coast of Greater Marrow at daybreak. Haddock and cod fill the hold behind a rusted engine with a beating heart.
There’s a melody on the breeze—sorrowful strings carrying distant memory.
David Mason’s score, elegant and unsettling, a sea shanty warped as wood by time and tide. I want it on vinyl, but it’s out of financial reach.
Nevermind.
I fish, and forget.
Darkness arrives swift and fevered. Chromatic aberrations bleed into my periphery. A ghost shark slips past my hull. When did I last blink?
Madness creeps like cold into bone.
Nevermind.
I’ve stopped caring whether the fish are edible or cursed. The fishmonger will have them and my blades will still churn.
Another cast. Another eldritch catch.
Was that a shadow below?
Nevermind.
I am complicit in the obsession.
A fisherman lost to the tide, red-eyed and unblinking beneath the bedcovers.
Sleep-deprived. Alone. Horrible.
Nevermind.
She’ll come back.