Flesh

When enunciated correctly, the word is both deeply erotic and profoundly disturbing. Say it with me.

Flesh

Feel the tingle?

When you get tired of catching fish after fish, drift after drift, grayling after goddam grayling (with the occasional lipsticked dolly tossed in to make it marginally worthwhile); when you get tired of fishing that piece of costume jewelry, that perfectly round trinket, that princess-pink bauble painted with just the right nail polish; when easy fishing degenerates from easy to boring (perhaps thirty minutes, if even that long), your buddy says the ‘f’ word and something dark inside of you moves.

You know what you’re giving up. The numbers, the clockwork tug, the comfort and ease of your trapped air technology. (No Charles, it’s not a fucking “bobber.” It’s a strike indicator! For God’s sake, have some dignity.) You give up that mind-numbing rhythm of mending and catching, mending and catching, mending and catching.

They say that you don’t leave fish to catch fish, but they’re wrong. All fish are not equal. All fishing is not sport.

So you ignore the outside bubble line and focus, instead, on the inside snags; the slow water and blow-downs where rotting corpses gather in underwater creep shows. Phantoms, waving in tatters like carrion sheets on Lucifer’s clothesline. You dead drift (acquiring a whole new perspective on the term) tan stingers that, for all the world, look like soiled shreds of toilet paper flushed down Seward’s folly, but promise their targets the carnage they crave. You dredge the putrid downstream abattoir where the meat eater lies. You pursue the beast that's following its basest of urges, not daintily sipping on priss caviar as it gently flows by. You stalk the savage. You want him at his baddest, his inner zombie full-blown, his depravity manifesting in glorious carnivorous splendor.

He deserves a hook in the face and you’re all about giving him one.

Sure, you’re probably foregoing twenty, thirty, to chase just that one. That cannibal. That monster. And maybe, just maybe, he’d think about taking a bead, but what fun is that?

He wants… you want…

... flesh.