Read Away with the Fishes Online
Authors: Stephanie Siciarz
Away with the Fishes
Also by Stephanie Siciarz
Left at the Mango Tree
PINK MOON PRESS
Away with the Fishes
Stephanie Siciarz
Copyright © 2014 Stephanie Siciarz
All rights reserved.
Cover Art: Patti Schermerhorn
Cover Design: Andrew C Bly
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the express permission of the author. This includes reprints, excerpts, photocopying, recording, or any future means of reproducing text.
Published in the United States by Pink Moon Press
ISBN: 0989686329
ISBN-13: 9780989686327
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014909553
Again,
for Barry
Honest man, early 40s, athletic, with fishing boat seeks honest woman, early 30s, with bicycle, cooking skills, and dainty hands. For immediate marriage.
On Oh I was known as a sea captain, though I wasn’t one at all. Captain Dagmore, they called me. Captain Dagmore Bowles. I’ve never commanded on ship or shore, and I prefer a grand piano to a grand sailing vessel. But I have
traveled
the seas, plumbed their very depths, if you must know, and I consider myself a not-so-accidental expert on the islands that dot the water’s surface.
An island worth its salt, I’ve always said, is like a well-composed sonata. I ought to know, for I’ve navigated the tricky terrain of more than one of each. Wind is meter, I say, to which the palms and pawpaws have to bend; tides and toads, flats and sharps that should never stray too far out of key; and the sea and sand, the staff upon which all the notes are splashed. I assure you that if ever an island was worth its salt—a bit
too
salty even—that is the island of Oh.
In fact, this is as much Oh’s story as it is my own, for my life didn’t simply unravel against the island’s backdrop. It didn’t dance methodically across the stage of Oh’s sands or recite its poetry to an audience of coco palms. No, indeed. Rather, it was the island theater that dictated the actors’ steps and mine. Its sun and its moon who at whim—as always—entangle the cords of the poor islander marionettes.
I lived on Oh not once but twice. And not anymore. I don’t live anywhere anymore. I, the once Captain Dagmore Bowles, don’t
live
at all, not in the manner of a moving, breathing man who plays piano or stretches his toes in the soft, gritty sand. I’m no longer a son, or a father. Not in the way I once was. I simply
am
. I float on
Oh’s shores. I walk on its winds. I watch the goings-on, the view so much better from where I am now.
When the island sits quiet, the odd (very odd) uneventful day on Oh, I return to the beach that made me the man I once was, haunt the house that broke my heart, or sit atop the rocky peak that stole so many blissful hours from me. I could go somewhere new, I suppose, but why bother? Oh decided long ago that I (and mine) belong to her, to her mangoes and manchineels, her pineapples and prickly pear, and, above all, to her inconstant moon and her chilly sun.
Oh, the devilish undoings of
that
heavenly twosome! If ever you should come here, beware. Not just of your friends and your enemies (assuming you can tell which is which); be wary, too, of the sun and the moon, who spin around your head.
1
S
tories on Oh are not of the kind that can simply be told from start to finish, like gliding through the alphabet, each letter cozily tucked between the ones before and after. The island’s tales, they shift with the wind, and destinies turn on a teacup. My story is a case in point. It starts not with me, but with Bruce Kandele—editor-in-chief, copyeditor, reporter, and special correspondent of Oh’s only newspaper, the
Morning Crier
.
Bruce was vexed that, of late, the best he could do in the line of front-page news was an unusually sumptuous sunset or a plum pair of rainbows. Though he enjoyed a good sunset as much as you or I—a good rainbow, too—sunsets and rainbows were not the
Morning Crier
’s usual fare, and putting them on the front page had Bruce’s dander up. Oh’s trim daily typically fed on lean and meaty truth, not on natural wonders, too sweet to nourish and far too everyday to stir the palate. Now if, in the bronze and salmon hues of the setting sun, a crime had been committed, some infraction infracted or conspiracy conspired; if, under the colorful arcs that graced the sky in twos and threes like ripples in a pool, a theft took place, or a ruse; then perhaps. But pretty pictures for pretty
pictures’ sake were not going to sell a paper, and Bruce knew this very well.
Trouble was that for the first time in the history of the
Morning Crier
(which goes back three generations, maybe four), nothing was going on. Not a mystery, a calamity, a family feud. Usually given to melodrama, Oh had grown tedious. The island simply endured, its chorus of trees and scheming moon, its fickle tides and shifty winds, all as if asleep. Worse than that, their dull and sleepy communion shunned the islanders. Shut them out, it did, like goats on the wrong side of a fence.
The hummingbirds minded their business. The mosquitoes didn’t bite. Even the leaves kept to themselves, singing their rustling hymns in the most hushed of voices. Anywhere else, this would be the order of the day. But not on Oh. On Oh, the clouds cook up trouble. The stars spice up our stew. Sun and moon, as I told you, take turns playing roles in our islander tragicomedies. Bruce couldn’t remember anything like it, and neither could I.
Bruce feared the island’s silence to be the calm before an especially vicious (if front-page-worthy) proverbial storm. At night he studied the heavens. When would the dratted storm break? he asked them. And with what force? He checked the positions of the planets and the stars, examined the different hues that made up the nighttime sky, but he couldn’t spot a single sign to ease his apprehensions, couldn’t glimpse the slightest hint that whatever was stewing would be served up before long.
Part of Bruce’s interest in the island’s brooding mood was economic. If the best he could put on the paper’s front page was a pair of galloping rainbows, the paper was sure to go broke. Equal part of his interest ran much, much deeper than that. Like the rest of the islanders, he was bored, bored and a little bit worried. How
long would they tolerate an island so aloof? he wondered. What might happen if they tired, finally, of Oh’s taunts and its moping about? What might the bored and a-little-bit-worried islanders be capable of if their fancies weren’t tickled—and soon?
Bruce Kandele was not the only one who felt the way he did, though few others on Oh would have elaborated their position as eloquently (he was a journalist, after all). They would only have said that lately things seemed a bit “feeble,” as if the island were dozing, or a little bit drunk on rum and juice. Take, for example, Trevor Rouge, owner and operator of the island’s most popular bakery, and generally acknowledged good and jolly guy.
Trevor, after entering the world plump and promising, had grown into a man some six inches shorter than he would have liked to be. He made up for his stature (or lack thereof) with a tall-ish crocheted cap that housed his hair, with a razor-sharp wit, and a strong and admirable heart. Together they garnered him the immediate friendship and unwavering respect of everyone he encountered, and made of his bakery a sort of meeting place, a town hall dusted in flour where one was assured of warm company and warm buns, “old talk” (island gossip), and cheap cold drinks from a fridge that rocked and hummed.
Presiding as he did over the bakery court, Trevor often found himself in the midst of the islanders’ muddles, a position about which Trevor’s wife, Patience Rouge, had mixed feelings. Though she enjoyed the money and custom that his advice and company lured into the bakery, and liked very much to hear the island gossip he brought home, she thought it unwise of Trevor to get mixed
up in the islanders’ troubles. Trouble on Oh was infectious and Patience feared equally for her own health and his.
Ever-present at Trevor’s Bakery, besides Trevor himself, was Branson Bowles.
Doctor
Branson Bowles, to be precise. (Branson was once my son.) He taught history at the Boys’ School of Oh, the same school where Trevor and he had studied history and mathematics and literature. Rather,
he
had studied those things, while Trevor played cricket and rendezvoused with the girls and somehow in the end knew just as much as Branson did (though Branson is taller and bulkier, with no need to stuff big hair inside a big hat).
