Anemone
by Kevin Sterne
You know these short winter days make my mind wonder longer and I was sitting here fixing to write you a note reminiscing on when you and I was kids and the big lakes froze over in the middle of summer. How we walked across in our bare feet. Rippling water smoothed by time. Everything around us still like film. That moment felt endless.
We belly-flopped on the ice and slid to the other side and when we arrived we were older and our skin had seen a few more suns. You were spotted with freckles. Your orange hair’d turned auburn. Beard’d taken over my face.
We had the best time and nobody believed us. You’d grown to be a marine biologist, studying dolphins frozen mid-leap, octopus flailing in finished motion. I painted names on boats like Just Married. Husband, Father. Carrying on. Miniature solar systems in every wave.
We found that fish stuck in the ice, mouth agape and open to the world. What was it saying?
Some nights I lie in bed alone remembering how trees unfurled from that fish’s mouth, those mighty oaks with roots stretching like thick ropey hands. How mountains pushed up under the water from hidden bellies of amazing creatures we’ll never know. How you birthed a baby boy with eyes of water and skin of snow and sang to him. He grew up writing his mother letters the way I taught him, fishing with patience, keeping straight lines.
It wasn’t saying anything, that fish. I’ve learned that now. It was giving up and calling out to you and I, saying you’re both fishes too. It was cursing the silver beasts in the sky and our trailer cars and fish bars and recycling centers. How everyone helps no one else except their own selves.
‘Course we learned that when we was together and apart.
I don’t ever fish these days but for sending you letters. Figure I’ll get out of the house tonight and put one on a hook and send it down to you. Sit a spell and pass time like a glacier. Hardly ever feel the cold anymore, just a numbness in my feet.
You never answered my letter I tied to those balloons, or the ones I tucked in the holes of your favorite tree. I got a couple bottles laying around and you’re starting to turn me into a praying man looking for signs in the stars. I’ve stopped fishing, mostly. Who knows, maybe I’ll get it in me. Maybe I’ll even pull you out one day and ask if all that was real.
Kevin Sterne is a writer from Chicago living in New York. He wrote All Must Go (House of Vlad) and won the Phoebe Journal Prize for Fiction in 2020. He loves trees.
