John Langan

And then one morning my eyes pop open and waiting for me is this thought, I need to go fishing

and somehow you wouldn’t be surprised if the mountain closest to you were to cast off its trees in one titanic shrug and start to lumber away, a vast, unimaginable beast

You’ll have to excuse me: when I think back to what fishing used to be to me, I can almost forget what it became, so I’m inclined to linger on the memory

He smiled a lot, and his eyes were kind, which diminished the sharpness some, but if you reflected on his appearance, you might have thought that his was a face made for fierceness

This wasn’t what happened to me, but I guess that was because I’d been losing Marie for a long time before she was gone, and so had been using a lot of those same tricks on myself most folks don’t discover until much later

Maybe we’ve got everything completely wrong, everything, and if we could look through the mask, what we’d see would destroy us. You ever feel that way?”

The one I liked best was several years old, and showed a pair of man-sized cartoon salmon standing beside a stream, one smoking a cigar, the other holding a beer. Both fish have lines out and in the water, which is full of tiny people, dozens of them heading upstream, arms against their sides, faces pointed straight ahead. That was all: no witty caption, only that simple reversal that tickled my funny bone

Yet even after Dan and I had paid for our meals and left the diner and were continuing our drive to the creek, it was as if I were still listening to Howard’s voice, as if I were inside his story, looking out at everything, as the story uncoiled around me

For the next four days, I wrote. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, and I understood that the story had passed to me, that somehow, Howard had tucked it inside me

You might imagine Dan and me sitting somewhere off to the side of the drama that’s about to debut, while Howard points out to us who’s who and what’s what. Or maybe you should imagine us walking the margins, watching the story unfold across the page.

This is what I received