Fish

Fish She got on the local train, settled for one seat, no one seated right next to her. Within seconds, she discovered the next seat was utterly splashed with dry mud stains. Next, on the other row of seats, an old man, a fisherman, an angler, with a handmade walking stick, eating some bread or pastry that got him into a sea of crumbs. No swordfish. She wondered: could all these people be savage? Who could have left all the dirt behind on the seat next to her, had they been sitting with their boots on the seats, had they thrown their filthy bags on the seats, were they dressed in mud, had they carried all of it with the only intention to dump it on us? She then remembered about another train journey when she admonished a no-more-than 16-year-old girl eating sunflower seeds and spitting the hulls onto the floor. The girl almost silenced returned an angry gesture of collecting them. She thought then and now she should have gone about it more smoothly and have educated her with more kindness. If only she had met the old man before the girl: she would have gently and easily struck up a conversation about art since the girl seemed to be an art student, reckless, rebellious, though, as one could see, and would have given him as a subtle but bad case example. The girl would have eventually caught on to it, would have been awakened to common sense, and so she would have collected them in no time and no anger. Perhaps. That's how things played out in her imagination. However, reality was rather hurtful. As hurtful as the sound of music coming undisturbed from a loudspeaker someone carried out in the back, the loud ring tones of either the phone calls or notifications, games, and then the voices of people answering their phones and revealing half of their lives in the space of five minutes. With the book, which could have been a hook, on her lap, she kept on wondering. Could she be the savage, the one that didn't fit in? She felt people's common sense must have fallen victim to the lack of it. Just another sophism, she thought. Two more anglers, a man and a woman, in their sixties, got on at the next stop, also fishing for likes on social media after they'd been on a fishing spree. The man was too kind to her. The woman insecure. She wondered if those two could be lovers, old as they were. Well, people seek love all their lives. If only it were true love, not the kind that fills empty spaces, but the one that fits in. The gorge, the train was passing through while picking up passengers, was a place packed with all the stories anglers could tell, including the one of the same hobo taking the train as part of his distraction, as part of warming up in the cold weather by going on regular journeys. Some of the passengers knew him. Regulars. The man and the woman too. Maybe all the fishers on this route. She fished for something in her bag. A piece of paper: 'Today I'm going to eat some fish. Boned, deboned. Won't matter.' Credits for the photo and copyright belong to the podcast producer as part of her personal archive Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.