Gianfranco Mancini’s Reviews > The Fisherman > Status Update

The children hear her on the other side of the door, breathing heavily from her efforts. Maria, Helen’s oldest, will tell Lottie’s sister Gretchen that the breathing sounded like her grandfather’s in the months before his death, hoarse and harsh, and something else, wet, like the way you breathe when you’re congested. Slowly, Helen retreats from the door, shuffling back to what was her house and husband.

It’s hard to hold onto any tragedies that aren’t your own for very long. That’s something I learned after Marie died. In the short term, folks can show compassion like you wouldn’t believe; wait a couple of weeks, though, a couple of months at the outside, and see how well their sympathy holds.

She was there once when I had worked my way from the Esopus up a little fast-moving stream whose name I meant to learn later but never did. She was there one afternoon when I returned to my spot on Springvale to discover I’d have to share it with two old women sitting on lawn chairs. I can’t say I was haunted, exactly – that sounds a bit too regular for what happened to me. But I did have a visit or two.

So there I was, in, I don’t mind saying, a bad place, my wife gone and me doing what I could to join her. It was, you might say, a cold February in my soul. And then one morning my eyes pop open and waiting for me is this thought, I need to go fishing.

I’ve stood on the shore of an ocean whose waves were as black as the ink trailing from the tip of this pen. I’ve watched a woman with skin pale as moonlight open her mouth, and open it, and open it, into a cavern set with rows of serrated teeth that would have been at home in a shark’s jaws.