They had been walking, lost, for ten days. Time slipped. Stretched. Ducked into a bramble like a hare startled at the appearance of man. The boy in front stopped without warning, causing the one behind him to crash into his backside. The first barely noticed. 

“Here,” he said. Here was an open area in a forest of dark pines, water oaks, box elders, and an occasional low dogwood. The second boy recovered and peered around the slender back of the first. A third boy stepped wide of them both to see for himself.

Here, too, was a beach. A black-soiled, loamy cliff-face that sloped dangerously below their feet into a wide, still, obsidian ocean of freshwater. To the boys, it might as well have been a chattering sea that talked from one shore to the other for days.

“Bring it up,” ordered the first boy. The third, chosen as load-bearer for his neutrality, moved to the speaker. He took a knee and unslung a small, brown sack from his shoulders. The second boy watched as his hand disappeared inside the sack and emerged with a clutch of clear, worn nylon.

“We need a pole,” the first boy said.

The second boy looked away to avoid the first boy’s gaze. Shuffled from one bare, filthy foot to the other. Shoulders drooping, he walked a few meters in the direction of a tall, flexible-looking sapling of white ash. He returned with a makeshift pole to find the third boy sitting at the feet of the first, a round, rusted cylinder that might have once held coffee or shortening between them. Worms. Bait.

The second boy braced himself for an insult. Took you long enough. Or one wrapped inside the polite: Thanks, slowpoke. Instead, the first boy, between the other two in age, but taller and more beautiful than either, reached out and took the sapling from his hands.

The second boy examined the line, now stretched to its full extension. “It’s too short,” he intoned, as much to himself as to the other boys. “The shadow will frighten the fish.”

The third boy answered him. “It’s all we have. We were lucky to find it. It has to work.” The first, silent now, finished wrapping the tip of the pole with the line. He bent low and pulled a meaty, brown-pink megadrile from the can. He baited the hook as if performing a ritual, and cast it into the ocean.

A ripple broke the surface of the water and extended from the impact with a plop that reverberated through the trees. A cork bobber marked the portal into a dark, fluid world beyond their own.

After a few moments, the cork sprang to life with an insistent, measured descent and re-ascent that told of a creature stealing away. The three boys glanced at one another and back at the line, the limbs of their thin brown bodies rigid with expectation.

The first boy steeled his fists around the pole—pulled upward and back as he attempted to reel in their first meal in two days. A muscled length exploded the ocean surface. Black scales reflected a spectrum of color from a beam of light that slipped through the leaves above the water. His muscles tensed, the first boy flung the fish up and over the cliff. It landed wetly at their feet, flailing with the disoriented bearing of a newborn.

             Right away, all three boys could see this was no ordinary fish. Right away, it began to speak. Hearing its words, the second boy pounced on the fish. His fingers slipped on its scales, but he managed to hold its long thick form in his arms. He prepared to throw it back into the sea. Before he could free the fish, the first boy was upon him. Mute, they crashed to ground and wrestled as the third boy and the fish watched helplessly. 

The second boy was cowed. A knife was drawn. The fish was soon bleeding. Soon open. Silent. The third boy began to weep. The second sat several meters away, legs drawn to his chest with his arms, rocking himself slowly.

The first boy built a fire.  “I’m supposed to take care of you,” he muttered to the other two. But by now it was plain; they all three knew it—at least one of them would never make it home.