An Ice Fishing House, Abandoned, in Need of Repair

An Ice Fishing House, Abandoned, in Need of Repair That same shed waits by the trees. Waits on its skids for the lake to freeze, and the for the creaking joints of bickering stoop-shouldered men as they push it out to the center of a pool of glass. It houses the stories of fishing in winter, pulling sustenance, wriggling, through chiseled portals into another realm. Old men would wait like death, slow, their breath turning to steam until they could abduct their prey from the world below. Trout would flop with the thickness of a muscled fist, striking ice like distillery rage unhinged. They would twist and corkscrew, mottled black and silver slapping the frozen pane of the lake, waiting for suffocation to take them, as the old men drifted up in the steam of twice-warmed coffee, and the willow-the-wisp exhalations of ribald stories, retold, and finally forgotten.