It was quite dark in your house, which it normally is in late November, which it was. You sat on the sofa wrapped in your Mexican blanket. I only know it was that blanket because I had been to your house and seen it in the summer light a great many times. But as I said, that evening it was quite dark and the only light came from a candle that was sitting atop some books on the coffee table in the middle of the room and dripping hot wax all over the oriental cloth that your mother loved so dearly. You moved the candle off the cloth, for your mother, and onto one of the great tumbling stacks of hard cover books that sat all about your house. But the slick plastic covers that some librarian had bound the books in ages ago, and the less than subtle slant of your living room floor, had cause the wax to roll across the cover of “Indians of the West”, down the sides of “Organic Gardens in Temperate Climates” and the “Just-so Stories” and back onto your mother's favorite oriental cloth. In a fresh spot no less, near the center. All this escaped your notice, and well it should have because you were no more than nine and a quarter at the time and maintaining the appearance of things was something you took no part in, but busied your mother endlessly with. The fact is that the kind of care that your mother showed her oriental cloth was a variety quite foreign to you. It was not that you were unable to care for things, as the stuffed rabbit under your arm could attest, but rather that when you did care for a thing it was by getting it dirty and torn and clotted with wax.
I would like to digress a bit if you don't mind, and remind you of the time, quite long ago now, but not entirely erased from your memory or your character, when you cared for all things, or at least all the things that you knew of, so profoundly that you had to lie to yourself just to make a decision. A time when your decisions were not based on your own feelings, but on the feelings of the often inanimate things you were deciding between. You may scoff now, but this is precisely why I remind you. I can remember quite clearly how you wanted that last bit of strawberry kiwi slushy slopping about at the bottom of the vendor's machine, but asked our mother for the wild berry instead. You didn't do it to give others a chance to have the last cup, as there was hardly ever anyone else there, but because the berry blast looked so lonely and rejected in its fullness. And I remember even more clearly how you tried to re-write history when your mother insisted you choose the one you really wanted. You told yourself that wild berry was in fact so popular that it had been refilled only moments ago, and the strawberry kiwi had been churning nearly empty for weeks. Certainly if this was a possibility, no harm could be done in choosing the latter. Oh, what a slave you were to the feelings of others.
Now, if you don't mind terribly, I'd like to draw your mind back from the slush-puppy vendor and back from Jetto's Theme Park and Luke Morgenstern or go-carts or any of the perfectly lovely places it might have wandered in the course of the last paragraph, and sit it back down in your living room on that evening in November. You were telling me a story, me and your rabbit. You began the story because he had never heard it, but you let me hear because I was there anyways, and its a good thing I was, because otherwise you'd have no one to remind you now.
The story took place during the summer. You had managed to find a rod and line in an old fishing kit under your bed. The water was quite low, as you remembered, and the bottom was plain to see. On the bottom, nestled into the pebbly river bed, a little sliver fish swam round and round in circles. As she did, she pushed the rocks out, with the current of her ceaseless swimming, into a ring. You cast your line up stream a few times, out to shady spot where Toungore Rd. crosses over the stream, and as your hook bounced back to you in just a few inches of water, you thought how easy it would be just to wait for this convenient, little fish swimming in circles. So you did.
You lowered your line into the water, laid it down in her circle of rocks, and waited.
You said you remembered holding her in your hand, and that you pulled the hook out and ran a bright green cord into her mouth and out through her gill. Then you put her backing into the stream and staked the cord to bank. You cast your line back up the stream and as it bounced back over the rocks you watched two long black fish with whiskers swim over to the little circle of rocks. It was many years ago and you had yet to learn that to love and to have a thing were quite different: that to care for and to own were worlds apart.
She swam hard against the cord, lunging back toward her nest, just a few feet away. You knew then that it was her nest, but when you were telling your rabbit the story you left out this little revelation. You explained that she was startled at being taken out of the water and staked. Which she must have been, in part. But this, you knew, was not the whole story. Your rabbit knew it too, but you had a very Zen sort of rabbit who always sat and listened until you gave him his turn to speak. Nonetheless, you let the silver fish tug away at the line and watched as the black whiskery fish began sucking at the stones in the nest. Slowly they lost interest, and so did you in the whole business of fishing, and you packed up your things to go.
“But what about the silver fish”, asked your rabbit, as you had hoped he would. “I let her go”, you told us. She looked quite confused and when you put her back in the water. She swam over to her nest for a moment and then away up stream. “It was a sort of cheap sport to have lured her in the way I did,” said you. “But I outwitted her fair and square, and that's all that fishing is,” you added quickly. Your rabbit nodded in agreement, he had missed some of the story and wasn't quite sure what had happened, but maybe you weren't either. The trick that you had learned so many years before at the slush-puppy vendor was coming in handy. I thought to say something to you about it then, but we were getting hungry and it was time for a rice cake. Perhaps you understand now, or then again, perhaps not.
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