Your Ambitious Day for Fishing

Gabe Kaminsky

You were fishing because why wouldn’t you be. It was summer after all. The current was languid and hypnotizing, uniformly heat injected, and it felt like the river had existed for all the millions or what not years of the planet. It was solid and there in front of you. You could grab it. The trees, sure, the gigantic evergreen trees. They didn’t rock or shake or sway or bristle in the breeze. They didn’t even breathe. You thought they could see you though. They had eyes really.

And the buttery sun radiating on your palms and in your eyes, down on your forehead, grilling against your flabby skin, and on the callouses on your feet, and in between your gummy toes. Its warmth while intense was wholly intrinsic because you knew this was what you came for. This was what you ordered up.

I could’ve told you where the fish were, where they all were, and which parts of the river they favored—which nooks and crannies they laid in to eat the plasticky guppies—and you could’ve caught them all. But that would’ve been no fun and you know it.

You sit there and your mind is neither at war nor at peace. It just is. You are hunched forward and your hand is nestled on your chin like The Thinker sculpture, and you look at the trivialness of the water, how it doesn’t move or do anything at all, how its frozen in summer, and you wonder if you could sit here forever. I didn’t blame you then and I don’t now.