I'm not sure whether this is a self-contained short story or the first chapter of something bigger. I haven't quite worked out what happens next. Bon appetit.
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Gaius was hungry. He twisted
the coarse fibres in his hands, and hefted the weight of the net again. He'd
been fishing all afternoon, and as he turned, coiling his muscles, he could feel
his strength waning.
He watched as the net bunched and
flared, carving diamonds into the water and closing like a flower. Despite his
hunger and fatigue, the beauty of it still moved him.
As the net sank, Gaius' hungry
mind compiled a hypothetical inventory of the waters beneath him. He thought of
the darting minnows that would escape his clutches, and the sleek, fat
mackerel that would futilely struggle for freedom in the narrow places of the
net. And deeper still, the prehistoric introverts of the sea floor, gnarled
spider crabs and sea urchins that had to be cracked with a rock, like a nut,
before yielding their flesh.
He began to haul in the net
with the unassailable optimism of the hungry fisherman. When the slack was
gone, Gaius raised his eyebrows in excitement, for the net at the bottom of the
sea was heavy.
Very heavy, in fact. Surely
heavier than the largest spider crab he'd ever seen - now distorted with time
and memory, the enormous crab his father and uncle had caught when Gaius was
just nine years old. They had carried it back to the village between them, such
was its weight. The diminutive Gaius had stared at this leviathan for hours, reconstructing
the splinters of its shell by firelight, after the entire family had been satiated.
These memories flooded through
Gaius' mind as he bent his tired limbs to the chore of hauling the net in. He
could not possibly believe that he had caught anything so heavy. The net must
have just snagged on a rock.
But a fisherman is by his
nature superstitious, and a hungry brain is an unpredictable creature. Gaius
was unable to completely extinguish his hopes of so large a meal. He sweated as
he hauled in his net.
After several minutes of
feverish effort, his shoulders slackened. The water was dark with the dying day
but clear, and he could see that the net contained nothing more than a large,
round rock. Gaius sighed, and hauled his catch ashore. At least there was bread
at home.
The rock was somewhat larger
than a man's head, and as it emerged from the sea Gaius' interest was
re-engaged. What a perfect pattern the sea had wrought on it! The ceaseless
efforts of tides and sands had created luxuriant curls over its surface. In the
water and the evening sunlight, it shone like marble.
The dragging net rolled the
rock along the sand, and Gaius was transfixed. An eye. An unmistakable eye
stared at him through the crust of sand.
No spider crab this, but no round
rock either. The fisherman's cold hands clumsily freed the head from its
confinement and brushed the sand from aristocratic cheekbone and flowing beard.
Gaius looked around thoughtfully.
He would not carry the head home, not on an empty stomach, not to an expectant
family who would see him bearing a burden in the half-light. He returned to the
small grotto, little more than a hollow in the rocks by the shore, where he had
earlier placed his knapsack, canteen and pocket knife. Removing his belongings
from the small shelf, he placed the head there and returned to his net, coiling
it about his arm.
As he turned for home, he felt
a pang of the same superstition that had made him keep hauling that net in all
day, the superstition that had been so intense following that final cast. The
head stared at him reproachfully, sand on its wide brows, sand still in the
artful curls of its hair.
Gaius took his canteen from his
knapsack and finished what little fresh water he had left, before kneeling on
the rocks and filling it from the sea. He carried it over to the relic and,
with a reverential air that made him feel self-conscious, poured the water over
the head.
The saltwater pooled like tears
in the blank, marble eyes. The oblique evening light pooled in the water and
lay there winking. The great grey eyes blinked.
Gaius took a step back,
convinced that the light was playing a trick on him. The eyes blinked again and
their marmoreal emptiness vanished. They were the colour of oceans.
