Work Text:
There is fur in the air. Not visibly. Not at first.
But he feels it. A thickness. As if the room has been lined in matted undercoat shaken loose from too many winter dogs. It gathers in the corners of his vision. Soft. Floating. Slow as snow.
The dog bowls clink.
A small, accidental percussion, metal nudging metal. The sound threads with the faint chime of tags knocking against worn leather collars. A domestic wind chime. He listens to it like it means something.
He cannot remember if the sound is behind him or inside him.
The bait writhes in the tin. Slippery, pink-gray loops. He picks one up and it slips through his fingers, leaving behind a sheen that smells like iron and damp soil. Worms are honest. They don’t pretend to be anything else.
The dock groans beneath him.
He tastes ibuprofen before he swallows it.
Chalk. Bitter. Artificial orange that pretends to be mercy.
His tongue lingers on it like a warning.
There’s a younger thing in his brain, something primitive and fox-quick, that whispers that he is poisoning himself. That this will rot his liver. That organs are delicate sacks waiting to bruise. He imagines them staining dark inside him.
He swallows anyway.
The bottle says two.
He takes three.
Water and mud carry that deep, vegetal scent. Rot and life indistinguishable. He breathes it in like instruction.
The line jerks.
A fish bites.
For a moment, the tug does not belong to him. The rod bends in someone else’s hands. The lake pulls at someone else’s wrist. He watches the movement happen from a few feet to the left of his body.
He looks down into the ripples.
There is a face there.
He studies it carefully.
The nose is familiar in shape. The mouth looks like it has bitten its own cheek before. The eyes are pale and uncertain, like an animal’s when a flashlight hits it in the woods.
He does not know the name attached to it.
The water fractures the reflection before he can decide.
He imagines stronger things.
Boat varnish in the shed.
The fish thrashes at the surface, flashing silver like a blade turned in light. Its body writes a frantic language he almost understands. He feels the hook in his own mouth. A phantom pull in the tender part of his jaw. He tastes iron, blooming from inside his cheek, opening a healed bite.
The dog bowls clink again.
He imagines fur collecting on his shoulders, matting into his hair, damp from the air off the lake. He imagines that if he shook himself hard enough, the person-shaped outline would scatter and something leaner would step forward.
The line goes slack.
He doesn’t remember reeling it in.
His hands smell like bait and lake and something metallic he doesn’t want to name.
He stares at them as if they were borrowed.
Somewhere behind him, a dog huffs in its sleep. The tags settle. The air clears.
For a moment, he feels almost assembled.
Then the wind moves across the water, and the face in the ripples dissolves again.
A catfish lay before his boots, whiskers useless, mouth agape. He knows the taste of mud will never leave them both.