A Story
by Paul Weidknecht

       Nammescong Creek flowed into the backs of my thighs as I fished, pausing between casts to secure my balance in the current and admire a new hatch of pale yellow mayflies lift from the stream. Over my shoulder, the sun dropped into a farmer’s cornfield, the final patch of orange light on the water enough for me to spot the small, vaguely metallic object at my feet. A credit card? Retrieving it, I ran my thumb over its raised lettering, rubbing away the mud and a string of algae. A name appeared, along with an expiration date. June 1984. I had discovered arrowheads here in the past, so it didn’t seem misplaced to find a tool used by modern man to obtain a meal.
       I took a moment to consider how the card had come to rest in the bed of the Nammy. I thought maybe there was a story in it. I was curious to know if the owner had lost his wallet while fishing, the whole trip ruined the second he’d inventoried his cash or dug out his license for a game warden. Over time the leather would’ve rotted into fish food, with the scoured plastic remaining. I wondered how many miles the card might have ridden on spring floods over the past quarter of a century. For all I knew he could’ve been robbed, the thieves stripping out the money and tossing the billfold away later as they crossed a bridge.
       Looking him up and phoning, I recited the card number and issuing bank. He laughed, recalling it as the first credit account he’d ever taken out, a line of imaginary cash in those years when he had no real money. But that finally changed, he explained, after an industrial accident cost him his left eye, the payoff from the plant enabling him to retire eight years earlier than expected and move to a small hobby farm in southern Virginia. He told me a glass eye wasn’t his style, so he had taken to wearing an eyepatch, which his wife still hates and his grandchildren—ages three, five, and seven—have always loved, as it makes Grandpop look like a pirate. He called them his Miracle Grandbabies, born to a daughter who struggled with alcohol and drug addiction for years—her rock-bottom in 1984, a year before she cleaned up for good.
       But in the end the man couldn’t remember ever losing his wallet, either by accident or theft. He said he’d never fished the Nammy, that, in fact, he'd always thought the sport a little boring, and so I came to realize there was no story here.