The Real Gods Don’t Walk On Water By C.R. Dobson

Stream dawn. Sun squeezed and stretched saffron and red-pink. Across the early horizon, black spruce bite up from the peat. It’s frigid; I shiver a little. I’m in the water, knee deep, waiting for the cycle to begin. My immediate air: juniperus and rich fecundities of the fen around the river bend.

Here the ghosts and gods live: the mist their respite. As ever, I’m a little afraid. Armed only with a rod and feathered hooks — no match for beings immune to the trickery I intend to undertake. They told me only when the shroud subsides, are the trout mine: with whistles and whispers and gnashing of teeth.

Never have I not held.

My bare feet are planted in the pebble bottom: creatures creep across my toes. I know they’re pupae paddling up and liberating themselves from their chitinous shells. Some will fall prey to the prey I seek before breaking the surface with their newly unfolded wings and ascending without a single lesson to the sky to accrete into clouds and select their mates — twice more to meet the water.      One time to lay. One time to sink away.

The sun strengthens and sizzles away the mist. Thrushes rush from the hoary tussocks skit scattering through the burgeoning showers of insects, mouths like mousetraps tripping shut on the ubiquitous bugs.

The dimension defying fish — their broadsides like empyrean panorama, nebulas gliding across their mucosal galaxy-scapes — rocket slickly from the stream for the close-hovering insects. They rise and rise. Their splashing attacks and surreptitious sips incite ripples that conflate and converse until the once-taut membranous surface bursts.

Safely now can I cast.

© 2014 C.R. Dobson

C.R. Dobson is a Yooper born and raised along the shores of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He has put his MA in Writing from Northern Michigan University to good use by teaching literature at a University in South Korea. His poetry and short stories can be found in The Smoking Poet, Sirr Magazine, East Coast Literary Review, Jersey Devil Press and Cranky Magazine. When not teaching or writing, he’s tromping through some jungle or other getting dangerously close to wild animals, reading books, or lolling in front of the television with his fiancée and white chinchilla Persian, Momo.

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