Managing Fish Stories

The white lies of late December are upon us. Frozen fish dream of warm tape water. Every step is a cliff-top until April then we surrender again to the telltale myths, the cheerful fraudulence. Only the old survive all this; beautiful people wash-up on sandy beaches create more buttery lobster commercials, evening gowns drip like sequined icebergs. The young are headlong as usual and will not stop until they mend us into their dreams, they sew our jester hats with a pitying love just as we did. It’s impossible to regret anything when the very ground under our feet is begging for more fables, more of anything to keep us going in a direction identified as forward. We who still dispense the sweet nothings of glassy-eyes wizards, must be seen as fully clothed, able to function on the old fictions steady, and not sinking into our frozen boots.