The Fisherman

My lost fishing rod in my hands, I reeled in the large fish Marie had called a nymph; only, when I hauled it out of the water this time, its front end encased not a skull, but Dan’s head, his eyes gone, his mouth open in a bloody scream

There was no particular emotion associated with it, no upwelling of panic, or terror; my body simply refused to entertain, much less obey, my brain’s commands

All that was different were her eyes, whose metallic hue seemed in keeping with the strangeness of seeing her, here

similar feeling of having started something whose outcome you can’t be one-hundred-percent sure of—sometimes, the percentage is significantly lower—but there isn’t the same openness that accompanies the lure’s trajectory. Sure, you think you know what’s waiting for you under the water, but believe you me, you can never be sure what’s going to take your hook

she married and bore children to a shy man from Austria who expressed himself more elegantly through the work of his hands than through his speech

But there was no confusing the black lines that had started to snake across Wilhelm’s cheeks, his forehead, as if some hidden artist were tracing them. Nor could the darkening of his tongue, his teeth, escape the notice of the students seated nearest him

Instead, this was a tongue which was woven into—into everything,” Rainer sweeps his hands around him, “so that to name something was to call it forth

Our interest was the same: the languages that came before those we know, the tongues that lay beyond the beginning. Wilhelm was fond of saying that, once his work was finished, he would be able to tell what words Adam and Eve had spoken in the Garden.

He could not escape the water that rolled over him, that picked up his body and carried it far, far out, to the lightless depths where white demons sport amidst the coils of their great and terrible master

When he’s breathed his last, Clara, her eyes dry, will turn to Lottie and tell her that she lost her husband long before this. She lost him to light the color of the full moon, of the froth on top of a wave, of a burial shroud