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Ah, mackerel season. Say you are a sailor. Naturally, you are sailing on a Thursday evening, enjoying a beverage as the sun sinks below the skyline of Tampa. Then, zing! A meaty torpedo of fishiness flies out of the water. Then another! And another! It seems impossible that no one is brained by the piscatorial hailstorm. It seems impossible that the near victims often don't even notice it. (Ah, the power of enjoyable beverages and picturesque sunsets on a Thursday evening on Tampa Bay!)  The Spanish mackerel, scientific name Scomberomorus maculates, which does –– seriously –– translate as "silly spotted mackerel," is back in town. Sharply pointed and oily, iridescently dotted and foolish enough to sometimes bite the hand (or toe) that tries to unhook it.
I don't even need to write fiction.
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I looked up the word "simulacrum" a while back for a story I was writing, and I keep wanting to put it into wider circulation. It's defined as a copy or an imperfect image of a thing. Likewise the word "brace" means a pair. I'd thought it was more, as in "a brace of partridge," which seems like a small bag for a day's work. Anyhow, for your viewing pleasure, a brace of angular angler simulacra.  A long winter, a late spring.
The shape of the land shows like the ribs of a hungry animal this early in the spring. Waiting for the arrival of spring, Mr. Linton and I blazed a couple of new trails. It's easier to make a way without having to part that modesty-drape of leaves and grass. Naming the trails is surprisingly difficult, for what we end up calling them.
Anyway, a few days and a few yellow blazes later, we now we have Dead Possum Trail (named for the skeleton we found, natch) and what I first thought would be Trillium Trail. Then we noticed this: So, Broken Wagon Trail it is. Okay, yes, it's not technically a wagon. Neither is it precisely broken. But Abandoned Hay Rake Trail doesn't have the same ring, does it? Plus Mr. Linton named it, and what he says, goes. Sometimes. This time. Back to the narrative. Late spring this year: even the old oaks seemed to be having a hard time waking up.  My Daddo was petrified of snakes. A traumatic childhood canoe mishap rendered him and his sister and his mother all terribly snake-averse. In later years, he referred to them as "serpents" in a mostly ineffectual effort to keep from getting the willies* when talking about them.
Mumsie was seriously afraid of spiders but pretty much loved any other living creature in the world. She said, "Oh, for pity's sake. Put them down before they warm up and start biting you."  Lo these decades later, the vaccination still works. A little corn-snake lurking among some line doesn't bother me one bit.
I wonder if he imagined he was invisible. He didn't have much of a grip on how complementary colors work on the color wheel. It's a like scene from a Michael Bay film. *Ooh, yeah, that Flickr site: so there's someone who re-creates Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons using Legos. I may have reached the end of the interwebs. |
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