Trawler Regret
flash fiction | unfortunate promise
I’m not into boats. Nor fishing. Yet here I am, nursing nausea by myself below deck on a 63-foot chartered trawler while my office coworkers topside celebrate a banner sales year. Everyone else thought it a great idea to book the four a.m. outing. I was too inexperienced to think straight. Or think that four a.m. and/or the two a.m. wake-up are, in fact, times that exist in reality. (They shouldn’t).
Fortunately, the worst is over. My certainty, or desire, for immediate demise is lessening.
I climb the ladder back to the deck like a toddler discovering stairs. Although any actual toddler would be more confident. The Pacific has settled into a lazy gray roll under an overcast sky, as the Channel Islands on the horizon appear prehistoric and judgmental.
“Hey! Lazarus returns!” shouts Bryce from Accounting, a man who usually gets winded using a heavy stapler. He poses for a photo with something silver and unhappy dangling from his line.
Around the rail, everyone is catching fish. They erupt from the water every few minutes as if they had been offered a highly aggressive commission structure.
Sarah, who spent the entire boarding process complaining about the harbor smell, smiles for a selfie with a glistening, copper-colored, floppy thing.
Trevor, who once sliced his own thumb opening yogurt, brings in something large enough to require consultation.
Even Melissa from Legal, who earlier asked whether fish had unions, pulls one in while apologizing to it.
“Finally joined the living!” the Captain bellows, slapping a slimy hand onto my shoulder. “Don’t worry, son. Cody here’s been holding a rod for you all morning. White seabass are waiting to go home with you.”
Cody doesn’t just hand me the gear; he operates me like a marionette. He pins a live squid to the hook, casts the line with the grace of an Olympian, then stands behind guiding my hands on the reel.
“Just wait for the tug,” he says. “Everybody catches fish out here.”
An unfortunate promise.
I hold the fishing rod the way archaeologists might hold a cursed ceremonial staff. Around me, the cheering has settled into the satisfied murmur of those for whom success is now routine.
My own lack of the same reaches a point of statistical impossibility. A fish breaks the surface, looks directly at me, then dives straight for the hook of the person sitting three feet to my left.
Regardless, Cody dedicates himself to my success with missionary zeal. He changes hooks, locations, bait, depths, techniques. He repeats, with waning certainty, “Everyone catches fish.”
Apparently the sea and I have reached a mutual understanding. Nothing below intends to come up to me. And I have no intention of going down. We are at peace with this arrangement.
But not Cody, who stops offering encouragement and begins regarding me the way a priest attends to someone receiving last rites before abandoning me with a similar finality.
By the time we turn back toward the harbor, every cooler on the boat but one is well stocked.
As consolation, Carl from Shipping thanks me for helping him win an impromptu betting pool on my being the only person to catch nothing.
I ask how he knew.
“I didn’t.” He chuckles. “But I know you.”
At least the nausea is gone.
by George Alger
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