First published in The Florida Review, issue 43.1, Spring 2019

Pike, perch, walleye: the lake offers them in such abundance that Kent feels almost guilty each time he feels the line tense, each time he pulls back on the rod to bring the fish gasping into the sudden air; he is the arbiter of their lives. The dead lie in a neat row on the dewy grass. He has begun to think of them as sacrifices. He has no net, no bucket, no need to keep them fresh. He clubs them all over the head with the back end of an oar, so they will not be alive when he opens them.

It is cold on spring mornings this far outside the city, and Kent is wrapped in his brother’s flannel coat — at least he likes to think it belonged to his brother, not to whatever insurance broker or dentist is the owner of this lake — and his fingers cramp as he slips wriggling nightcrawlers onto the hook. Watery light spills from between the birches. A distant heron calls. He’s never been much of an outdoorsman; he’s spent his share of time lolling in a boat with friends, getting sunburnt, lazily trailing a line or two as an excuse to start drinking at eight in the morning, but this is entirely different. These fish give themselves up so easily. Maybe the lake’s rich owners have stocked it to bursting with these fat, eager creatures. Maybe this ecosystem needs to right itself, so its children are offering their lives. Kent’s brother Warren would have known, but of course he is not here now. Not the whole of him, anyway.

When Kent broke into the lake house the night before, the first thing he saw after prying the storm boards off the windows was a large illustrated poster of freshwater fish, their dappled tails arching, their common and scientific names printed beneath them in an authoritative serif font. Some of them were eating each other. It seemed a confirmation of what he’d come here to do. He’d brought his own fishing pole, but there were nicer ones in the closet: streamlined and glossy, without a single scratch or dent. One still had a tag attached that boasted of feather-light aluminum, titanium coating, premium Japanese ball bearings. The price was scratched out, but surely obscene. Had they removed it for Warren’s benefit, knowing that they paid him a relative pittance for his stewardship? Had they pictured him in the deepest winter, four feet of snow pressing in on the door of the caretaker’s cabin, and taken a Sharpie and censored a few digits and thought what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him?

Well, Warren showed them what he thought, in the end. The family won’t be here this summer, won’t cast off the dock with these shiny new poles. Their rowboat is skimmed with algae. Their dreamy lake has been corrupted.

– – –

By evening at least thirty fish are lined up along the banks, striped perch and gilded walleye, a couple of fat bass; a feast if he wanted it. Kent takes a breath, steadies his hands. He kneels in the mud and feels it soak through his jeans. He pulls his knife from his pocket and begins to work, slitting their rubbery skin, exposing their depths to the air. He opens each in turn. Their blood pools thickly in the grass. They stare up at him with lightless eyes, mouths agape. When he is done he leaves them in the grass, their bodies growing vague in the dimming light. He washes the blood off his hands in the lake, watches it bloom outwards and dissipate. He does not go to the lake house, its immaculate marbled kitchen with dish towels folded neatly in drawers; there is nothing more for him there. He goes to the cabin where his brother lived, to the cot that still smells like sleep.

That night Kent dreams of a huge black-mouthed catfish devouring him, of minnows taking delicate nibbles of his waterlogged skin until his body is in ruins, identifiable only by dental records, no longer a person with a name or a face but a forgotten, bloated object bobbing in the lake. In this dream he has drowned himself. In this dream he is his brother.

– – –

Warren was the first at everything when they were boys. Three years older, far wiser. He taught Kent how to whistle, how to roll a joint, how to get a girl to let you put your hand in her pants. He had an unceasing confidence, though as he grew older Kent began to recognize a sharp, bitter edge to it that made him uneasy, showing itself sometimes like the glint of sun off a knife. Warren worked in landscaping, roofing, blue-collar jobs where he’d come home dirty and could drink as much beer as he wanted without growing a gut, while Kent went to college and got fat. When Kent was away at school Warren would sometimes make the two-hour trip up on weekends, take him out for a night on the town. He would always leave before the morning, like a one-night stand, tucking a twenty dollar bill beneath the stacks of textbooks on the coffee table. Sometimes on these visits Kent would stir in the middle of the night and look out his bedroom door to see Warren stark awake on the couch, staring at the wall. Hands on knees, unmoving. It seemed like a dream. But Kent never brought it up; what exactly could he say?

Kent has been to the lake only once before, a few months earlier, when Warren called him suddenly on a Friday afternoon and asked if he wanted to have an adventure. Adventure: the word he used when they were kids and he wanted to convince Kent to do something frightening. It was the end of summer in the city and autumn in the mountains, green giving way as Kent drove upward to scarlet, purple, gold. Kent was missing a pub trivia championship for this. He’d almost said no, but there was something in Warren’s voice that told him not to.

When he got there Warren was already leaning in the doorway of the caretaker’s cabin, holding two open beers. He grinned, raised his eyebrows. He somehow gave the impression that he’d been standing there since he got off the phone hours earlier, waiting, but of course he’d just heard Kent’s tires crunching over the pine needles on the driveway.

“All right,” said Kent, as Warren clapped him on the back. “What’s the adventure?”

“First things first,” said Warren, and handed him one of the beers.

They stood in the lake breeze, sipping. The whole place looked like the cover of a travel brochure. Quaint little rowboat, perfectly weathered dock, a mallard drifting through a stand of reeds. Funny to think this was Warren’s home now– ten months out of the year, anyway. In the summers he’d been living out of a van he’d bought for $500 and trying to hike the Appalachian Trail.

“You have friends up here a lot?” asked Kent. “Seems like a good place for a party.”

Warren shrugged noncommittally. “It’s a long drive.”

“What kinda digs you got in there?” Kent peered into the darkness of the cabin, squinting. It smelled damp, like moss, with a hint of unwashed hair. The luxury of the lake house was less than a quarter mile away, but Warren had already told Kent that spending the night there was grounds for instant dismissal. It was hard for Kent to imagine this little cabin being enough space to live in, but then Warren had never needed much.

“It’s all right,” said Warren, gazing out over the water. He could be in the brochure, too, his plaid flannel jacket the color of the foliage, his jeans worn pale in the knees. “It’s a job, you know. It’s not that hard, just keeping the place in shape. It gets real cold in the winter, though.”

“I bet.” Kent had noticed the wood stove, the stacks of split logs along the side of the cabin. “You ever get on Tinder, tell ‘em you got your own private lake, you need somebody to keep you warm?”

Warren laughed. “Nah,” he said. “The elk keep me plenty of company.”

“Lots of critters up here. You could have a downright orgy.”

“Speaking of,” said Warren, and turned to Kent with an admonishing finger like a schoolteacher, “Not an orgy, sorry to disappoint you– but you watch that lake tonight. It’s a full moon, there’ll be plenty of light. There’s a bigass monster fish living in there, I swear it.”

“Oh yeah?” Kent squinted out across the shattering of sun on the water, wondering how deep the lake got in the middle. It wasn’t that big. Maybe just large enough to be called a lake, so that the owners could casually slip its existence into conversation at dinner parties: When we were up at our lake… Oh! You didn’t know? 

“Think it’s a catfish,” said Warren. “Don’t ask me how it got there, ‘cuz I’ve never caught a catfish in this lake, but I’ve seen it. It’s a legend, far as I’m concerned. The Loch Ness of Lake Connelly.”

“Loch Ness is the name of the lake, dude. The monster’s just the monster. Like Frankenstein.”

Warren rolled his eyes. “Anyway,” he said, “There’s a big fuckin’ fish in that lake, is what I’m saying.”

“Is that the adventure?”

“Nah. I’m leaving him alone. He deserves to be here.”

“Well, I’m dying to know what you’ve got me in for,” said Kent, “so what’s up?”

Kent expected a wry smile, a slap on the back, a great spin on a stupid idea– but none of that came. Warren took a long, slow sip of his beer, like he was stalling for time.

“I guess there’s not really an adventure,” he said, finally, his voice quieter than Kent had ever heard it. “I just thought maybe you’d like it up here.”

– – –

The morning brings fog, wide swaths rolling off the lake with the sun, smaller patches drifting like ghosts into the woods. Beads of dew glitter on the gutted bodies of the fish laid out along the bank. Smoke rises from a distant peak. It is astounding how alone Kent is here. It’s not that far to the main road, where other people’s driveways break the columns of trees, but from where he’s standing it might as well be a frontier. He thinks about Warren in the darkest days of winter. Lake iced over, night tapping at the door. He walks out to the edge of the dock and looks down into the fractured shapes of the water weeds. 

Kent fishes through the morning, catching tiny things he’d normally throw back and great shimmering beasts that would be a prize under other circumstances. When he slits one big stippled pike from belly to gills he finds it bursting with what looks like angel hair pasta, thin pale strands crowding its organs, filling it until it’s more tangled white than fish– and what could possibly have caused this? Cancer? Worms? Kent throws it into the treeline. His heart is beating hard. He washes his hands in the lake, blood and dirt and sweat. What a stupid thing to unsettle him, after everything that’s happened.

The rowboat lies upside down on the bank, surrounded by yesterday’s fish. Kent goes over to it and rights it. Pill bugs squirm underneath. He pushes it into the water, watching eddies swirl outwards. It bobs, mottled with mildew, paint chipping; it doesn’t look idyllic anymore, just abandoned. Kent wonders whether Warren left it out all winter. Surely it was meant to be stored away. Maybe Warren took it out all the time; maybe he never took it out at all. There is a lot that Kent doesn’t know. 

He taps the boat with his foot. It rocks steadily. It creaks when he steps in, but holds itself afloat. He settles into balance and pushes off, his momentum carrying him towards the windy center, and when the boat stops he does not row but only sits there, riding the subtle swell of the waves. The sun is bright and directly overhead but still barely cuts through the chill. Kent drapes his arm over the gunwale and lets his fingers graze the water. How deep is it? How far to sink? Does the monster catfish lurk down there, hidden in the shadow of the boat? He leans until his hand is in the water, then his wrist and the cuff of his shirt. He feels the boat rock beneath him as his balance shifts but still he pushes on, and he nearly makes it to his elbow before the boat pitches over sideways and the water swallows him and he almost breathes it in with the shock of the cold, and panic rises in his chest although he has done this on purpose. He opens his eyes in the water. It is green, thick with particles; frightened fish dart through columns of light; pieces of pondweed drift against him and worry with the waves at his cheeks. His lungs begin to burn and he pushes against the weight of his clothes to break the surface, to gasp the air that now seems warm. The rowboat is upturned, distant, slowly working its way to the shore. Kent bobs up into a back float (for him, always effortless, something that Warren had envied) and now sees only the pale blue sky and a single hawk crossing the sun. He can barely feel his limbs. He hasn’t swum in anything but a pool since he was a kid, when he and Warren used to spend whole days at the municipal pond in their hometown, until one summer Saturday it was entirely deserted and when they came out of the water their skin was covered in a stinking film of algae. It had taken over the pond, somehow; it had found a foothold and crowded out the rest. Warren told him assuredly as they scrubbed their skin with a paste of sand that the town would never let people swim there again. He was right, of course.

This is how it was, growing up with Warren. It was the knowledge of a competence above you that could make the mysteries of the world unfurl themselves; it was clamoring out the bedroom window at midnight; it was riding in the back of a pickup truck going 80 on the highway, fingers numb from gripping the sides. It was bands in basements and gasoline on bonfires. It was exhilaration and it was fear. It was waiting in bed as the clock crept into morning and wondering when Warren would return, if he would return, if this was the night that something terrible would happen; it was watching him do his party trick of putting cigarettes out on his arms, but all alone this time at the kitchen table with the afternoon sunlight slanting in. All of this disappearing into memory, becoming just a story. A life reduced to a box of ashes and a strip of police tape blowing in the wind.

Kent is shivering now, his fingers curling in on themselves, and he knows he should swim before he starts to cramp, but still he doesn’t move. Did Warren make it this far out? With the cinder block, of course, he would have sunk right off the dock, but what about after? He was here so long before he was found, before the owner drove up, fuming, ready to fire him on the spot for ignoring so many voicemails about pressure washing the siding. By then Warren was floating. By then he was food. He had nourished the spring’s new crop of fish, given his eyes and tongue and soft sloughing skin to the murky water, and only his clothes were holding him together. When they pulled him from the water he fell apart.

Kent rolls onto his stomach into what he remembers from Boy Scouts as the survival float, face down in the water, icy swells lapping at his ears. He could breathe in so easily, curl his limbs to sink. But he doesn’t. He breaststrokes back to shore and lies shivering in the reeds, wet clothes clinging to his fleshy frame, until he summons the energy to walk to the cabin and stoke the fire and hang his clothes to dry beside it and wrap himself in blankets. He kneels so close to the wood stove that one wrong move could burn him. He tries to think of nothing, but his mind keeps returning to Warren in those last hours, alone in this little cabin. Did he laugh? Did he weep? Did he think of picking up the phone? How set was his mind, how few his regrets? What was he thinking as he walked that dock like a gangplank, cradling his cinder block, stepping closer and closer to his last sensations? How could anyone make a choice like that? How could anyone have such unfaltering will?

These thoughts keep Kent up into the dark owl hours, and no matter how much wood he piles in the stove he cannot find a way to keep warm. No matter how hard he tries to sleep he can only picture Warren sinking, rays of light piercing the film of algae above, the cold water slowing his blood. It must have been peaceful, in a way. At least until his hindbrain took over. There must have been a moment of ultimate calm, a relinquishing of memory, where Warren was only what he was in that very instant: no past, no future, just the infinite now. The only way to live forever.

– – – 

Things are clearer when the sun comes. Kent feels less likely to disintegrate. His muscles are sore and the backs of his eyes ache and the world has that sharp-edged quality of daylight without sleep, but he is alive. He takes his rod to the dock. He works the cold out of his fingers by tying clumsy knots until he gets the hook on right. The wind blows towards him and the sun glints harsh off the crests of little waves. He catches perch, pike, an endless array of common fish that finally begin to seem like a waste. He lays them on the ground beside the corpses of their brothers. The old ones now are gathering flies, beginning to fuse with the ground. An animal has come in the night and torn some of them apart. The grass all around them is trampled. Kent can’t quite meet the stare of the fish that still have eyes. He takes an oar and begins to push them into the lake, their bodies sliding and breaking apart, until all but the fresh ones are bobbing in the water. Now the others can eat them. Because the big fish eat the little fish and the little fish eat the littlest ones and all of them eat what is offered, like feasts that appear from above. The smell is overwhelming. Kent walks up to the treeline for a breath of fresh air and sees hawks circling above. They can smell it too; they are waiting for their gift.

Kent spends the rest of the day with the fresh fish, kneeling in the dirt: first he cuts them open, then carefully slits each tiny stomach to discover what’s inside, pushing the half-digested ooze around with the tip of his knife to make sure he sees it all. After this he guts and scales them, running his knife across their bodies with awkward hands. He feels lightheaded, off-balance. A dull headache pushes at his eyes. He has barely eaten anything since he got here. Twice he needs to stop and rest. He chops the fishes’ heads off and throws them back in the lake so they cannot see him. When he is done it is twilight, a low violet in the sky along the tops of the trees, the brightest stars beginning to glow, and he hauls the fish up to the cabin and stokes the fire in the wood stove and rummages in cabinets until he finds tin foil. He lays it out over the stovetop and spreads some of the fish out. At first he burns them, but he opens and closes the damper until the heat is right and the fish sizzle. He piles on salt, pepper, Crisco found in the pantry. The cabin fills with heat and the smell of cooking. When the fish are done Kent puts them onto a makeshift plate and cooks more, until all of them are crisp, browned, steaming, and then he sits cross-legged on the floor and eats.

They are delicious, perfectly seared, dripping with fat, the best food Kent has had in months. He eats until his stomach hurts and then keeps eating, until everything is gone except the papery skin. He lies down on his blanket by the stove and shuts his eyes and draws his knees up to his chest. He is full for the first time since he arrived. He is a man who is used to eating. He lies there surrounded by the warmth and the quiet sounds of the fire and he feels almost normal again, until the pain in his stomach becomes hard to ignore. He shifts to find a more comfortable position but this only makes it worse. Heat rises in his chest and his mouth gathers saliva. He focuses on his breath, but he knows that his body is about to betray him. He rushes to the door and throws himself outside to vomit just clear of the porch. He kneels on the floorboards with his head between the railing posts and vomits again and again, the sting of bile making his eyes water. He could hold all of this inside himself for only a moment. What else did he expect?

When it is over he sits back, body buzzing with exhaustion, and gazes out across the starlit lake. He can’t seem to focus his eyes. The moon is low and bright and seems to him like a beacon, a distant lighthouse warning him of danger. The lake house is a simple void, a lack of trees, shapeless but for the pale gleam of moonlight on its gutters. The wind picks up and ripples the water and stings against the heat of Kent’s cheeks and he realizes how cold it is, growing colder, and yet this is only spring. It is hard to imagine the winter. And Warren was up here in all of that, not leaving even for Christmas, never calling or sending a text. Kent could have called, if he’d remembered. But maybe it wouldn’t have mattered.

Out on the lake the water is swirling, like a tiny tornado has formed. There is some kind of shadow underneath, or seems to be– Kent isn’t sure if he can trust his own sight. He squints and then suddenly something breaks the surface in a violent spray– a huge fish, a catfish, its whiskers shedding water as it spins– and just as soon as he’s realized what it is, it crashes back in again, leaving shivering ripples in its wake. The monster fish. The Loch Ness. 

– – –

Kent shivers on the dock all night, casting far out into the lake, reeling in the line each time to find only stupid gape-mouthed walleye and perch. He pulls the hook from their lips and throws them back. Maybe he is catching the same fish again and again. Every time he looks into their eyes he feels a nervous swell in his stomach. Even through the cold and layers of clothing he can smell the stink of his own body, and when the wind blows he can smell the stink of the bits of fish left on the shore. He is still fishing when the morning comes, first as a pale glimmer and a quieting of crickets and then as an unbearably piercing sun. He gets up to piss into the lake and watch minnows mouth dumbly at the ripples, and then he sits back down with his fishing pole slack between his legs and the heels of his hands pressing into his eyes until all he can see are white sparks.

Something tugs at the line. Kent feels the pole begin to slip away and grabs it just in time, before it sails off the edge of the dock. He jerks the rod to set the hook and squints in the sun as whatever he’s hooked starts thrashing. He thinks about how everyone says fish can’t feel pain but no one ever asks what they thrash for, then, and the fish suddenly dives for the bottom, pulling line off the reel so fast that it almost whistles in the air. This fish is fighting more than all the others. This fish does not want to die. Kent braces his feet against the dock posts and starts tugging, reeling, watching the growing bend in the rod. He thinks for a moment of loosening his grip, letting the rod sail out into the lake and be lost forever, because this is the fish’s home, not Kent’s– but he feels the line slacken just a little and all this flees his mind and he again wants nothing more than to find out what this creature holds. His hands are sweating despite the cold. He reels, tugs, curses under his breath. Finally he has control again and brings it in close enough that it breaks the water, and it’s a catfish all right, flailing on the end of the line, twisting in the sunlight. Kent swings it up onto the dock and it flops, gasping. It’s not as big as he expected. It’s not a Loch Ness monster. It’s just an ugly dying fish, no more than two feet long. He takes the oar and brings the back side down onto its head but this just makes it panic further. Kent pins the fish down with his knees and slams the oar again and again until it is entirely still and then he kneels beside it, staring into its empty eye. Blood leaks from the socket. Its head is partially caved in. He unhooks its lip from the line. He takes his knife from his pocket and saws into its belly, breathing hard, his hands unsteady, steam rising from the fish’s innards in the cold air. Here is its stomach, swollen and taut. He slits it open, the lightest nick of his knife spreading it apart, and its contents spill onto the dock: dozens of minnows, their little eyes shining; the bottom half of a frog; tangled clumps of pondweed and algae. Kent searches through this with his bare hands. It is slick and gelatinous. His fingers find something hard in all that mess, and he pulls it out and rubs it against his jeans to get the slime off, and then suddenly he cannot breathe because he is holding a tooth, what looks like a human tooth, wet and white and a little chipped, and he’s afraid he’ll drop it with his shaking hands. He lays it down on the dock in the cradle of a recessed knot. He reaches out to touch it, trying to keep steady, because the worst thing that could happen would be to lose it again– but as he turns it he realizes it’s just a rock, a ragged pebble, without roots or crown or marks of wear. He draws in breath, shuts his eyes, steadies himself with hands on the dock. The grain of the wood presses hard into his palms. Not Warren, not Warren. Only a piece of the earth. 

He sits back and picks up the catfish, its guts sliding out as he moves it, and stares into its flattened face. He grips its slippery body to his chest, its blood smearing across his shirt. He finds himself shivering. He finds his breath growing labored and a rash of heat spreading across his cheeks and the pressure behind his eyes becoming unbearable, and he bows his body inwards around the catfish like this creature is his own flayed heart, and he sobs. Big and ugly and heaving. His voice echoes across the lake like the cries of some horrible animal. His nose runs violently and snot drips to mix with the slime of the fish. He rocks his knees into the worn planking of the dock, bends until his forehead is touching it and he can see through the gaps between the boards to the waving pondweed below. This is the world he lives in, now: a world where Warren is dissolved, eaten, inextricable from the scene of his death. A world where Kent still exists. He will have to leave here. He will have to go home. He will have to pay his bills and go to work and clean his bathroom and cook himself dinner, and sit in the flickering light of the television, and find sleep somehow in the darkest stranglehold of night, and do it all again the next day and the next until the end of his life comes to find him. This is what existence asks of him. He knows there is a way out; he knows Warren found a way out; he knows Warren must have looked ahead to those infinite days and found them impossible to bear. But Kent will bear them. He cannot choose otherwise. He looks out over the water, its movements edged by brilliant strips of light. All of these creatures dead, and what does he have to show for it? A whole lot of nothing. A life’s worth of nothing. The catfish slips slowly from his arms, caught by gravity, too slick to grasp for long.