the fish

It was the oldest story in the book. Man catches fish, man falls in love with fish, fish leaves man, man is left fishless. He hadn’t realized it was in her nature to pick up and leave at the drop of another line. At first, the two had been in love, but they ended up just being in it together. He had the misfortune of being the second one to know. And in a team of two, that made him the last to know. For a little while, he sat across from her, slurping up his fishy soup, slipping into his fishy bed, hardly realizing that she had stopped being with him. For a while they did things as a team, and he didn’t realize in those last days that he was doing things on his own. For her, the end came predictably – like the period at the end of a sentence or the hook at the end of a line. For him, it came suddenly. He wasn’t watching for the warning signs. The sighs. The restless extra minutes it took her to fall asleep. The few extra hours spent away instead of near. The impatient looks into the silver backed mirror. He thought he had her caught and that was that. But, of course he was wrong. He underestimated the effects of a small pool, the effects of a small mind, and the desperate acts that comfortable boredom can drive some fish to – like taking the bate on a hook on a line on a pole held by a fisherman that might not follow the catch-and-release philosophy that the first fish-her-man followed.