F Is For Belonging

F is For Belonging

My dad untied the oldest looking boat on the shore from a stand of hawthorn trees. The boat was made from many different planks bending and rot was unfurling inside them.

We pressed into the water where a queue of waves delayed us for some minutes. We had come so he could teach me how to fish, because I had only known the city and his mind capturing nature, seeing it die on the pressure of man-made objects, now a part of my new way of belonging.

When we caught one he handed me the knife a little unfavourably, as if he didn’t trust what he was about to see. Every time I cut the blood seemed to say do you believe in me. It oozed between sheets of flesh a replica of pink I had never seen.

All the blood and leftovers covered the plastic table and its grey noodle legs, and the parts of viscera that a heart and a mind and a soul had sharpened into a whole living entity lay about in isolation, no longer belonging.

Her children had lived in a spawn under her abdomen. We threw them away and cooked her, stayed until the darkness came and the most unnatural thing in the world was our boat wondering on the separately begging waves. My dad wiped his mouth, said the whole experience was not like he recalled.

We drifted aimlessly and further across the resting monuments of water. The violence subsided. The salts in the sea had been there for years. But the stars in the sky were temporary, but they could span a trillion of our brains, but how the look and the distance made a fish or a man unsustainable. Before that enclosing ending, like curtains coming down on a stage of light, we searched and found, and lost and found, the sensation of belonging.