THE ANGLER AND THE WAINWRIGHT
AND THEIR ALICE

 

BECAUSE LOVE IS A complex system of overlapping greetings and departures, the places where love ends and begins is often obscured. While popular belief maintains that the body is the conduit for love, it is in the mind where love buds and breaks open and apart. And because the mind is a mysterious arena that is enveloped in comings and goings that intersect and knot like a dense web, it induces a variety of dread. This is why there are no Scholars of Love.

The Angler had met a woman for whom he cared. When she said she wanted a child, he felt giving her one would be a very kind gift. He would leave for weeks out to sea to lead his girls toward a proper life. Soon after the child arrived, he left for too many moons, and on his return he was not welcomed at the door because the woman had become mind-sick and then became gone. This is how the woman thanked him for his gift: she gave it back.

The Angler could not pursue his fishing ventures with the tiny girl at home, so he went to the village to see about more grounded work. On the way through the center of the village, his daughter holding his hand, The Angler spotted The Wainwright working on a wagon in distress. As they came closer, his daughter squeezed her father’s hand, because tucked into the place where his shirt met his neck was a flower of a very rare shade. It was a shade living on the precipice between the colors that she knew. It was a shade that collapsed those more familiar colors, that was even somehow missing from the magic in the sky that bloomed in the aftermath of storm.

And when the daughter and The Angler approached The Wainwright, he knew without looking up what they were there for and untethered the flower from his neck, handed it to the girl. Then he looked at The Angler with a smile that was also an invitation.

The Wainwright came to The Angler’s home that evening and The Angler told him all: about the woman and the gift and the disgrace he experienced at the peace of her release. And how wrong she always felt. And his shame at feeling most at home in the middle of the sea. And with the thin bone carcasses of emptied fish still left on the table, The Wainwright kissed The Angler’s forehead and then moved slowly toward The Angler’s lips. Then he took The Angler’s hand and led him to the bed.

Their Alice would watch The Wainwright mend wagons, and for every day The Angler was on a ship and the duo at home would be overcome with sadness at his being gone, they would make a notch in the door, so that when The Angler returned he could see how much they missed him. And The Wainwright would take the girl on long trips in the carts he fixed and she would see what lingered far beyond the village. And when The Wainwright would tuck her in at night, the girl would tell him that when she became old she would spend all her days searching for the mystical color that marked The Wainwright that very first day.

It was a year after the girl had begun to call The Wainwright Other Father and it was during a storm. The Angler returned to shore because he could read the sky and knew far worse was coming. When his home was in view, he saw The Wainwright approaching through heavy sheets of rain. From far away, their embrace looked gentle, but up close the truth was revealed: The Wainwright was keeping The Angler from falling to his knees.

It stormed for three days and they spent the whole time searching the wood, asking around the village, retracing every parcel of land they had ever let the girl traverse. They did not eat or sleep. They spent the storm apart.

They were cradling each other in bed when The Angler looked out the window to see the mystical shade that had marked The Wainwright that first day was smeared across the sky. He shuddered then and rose to close the curtain.