Caught, a fish hollers as it is brought out of the flashing water into the rubber boat. A fish holler is not a mammal holler, but rather the sound of gas escaping from a cartilage cavity. Fishing on a mountain lake involves knives, hooks, and a rubber boat. There is the risk that a metal object will pierce the rubber of the boat. Usually, the boat will likely not deflate any faster than it inflated on the shoreline. I huffed it full of spit and hot air until my eyes began to turn as round as two buttons, reflecting the rock and the waves and the gigantic cliffs at the far end of the lake. It takes time to fill a boat with air. It takes time to empty a boat.

I have been aboard a rubber boat on a mountain lake when we surfaced a rainbow trout the size of a large man’s arm, bigger than my father’s gnarled and sun burnt arm or my pale geeky arm sticks. We hooked the fish from the green and blue water filled with streaks of sunlight and drifting black clouds of silt riled from the stream easing through the peat bog. To kill this animal, my father used his knife to knock the snout. The tip of the blade slashed through the rubber boat hull. The entire boat became a loose sock. It was no more a boat than a t-shirt dropped on the surface of the water. We swam to the shore. The fish regained consciousness and for one harried quarter hour as we worked our way across the green and blue water filled with streaks of sunlight and drifting black clouds of silt we thought the fish was fishing us.

—————————
This is part two of a five part series of collaboration between Taibi Mastelse and me. She provided five collages, and I wrote text in response. We passed the pictures and text back and forth, and they are.