i caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth he didn t fight he hadn t fought at all he hung a grunting weight battered and venerable and homely here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper shapes like full blown roses stained and lost through age he was speckled with barnacles fine rosettes of lime and infested with tiny white sea lice and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down while his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen the frightening gills fresh and crisp with blood that can cut so badly i thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers the big bones and the little bones the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails and the pink swim bladder like a big peony i looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower and yellowed the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass they shifted a little but not to return my stare it was more like the tipping of an object toward the light i admired his sullen face the mechanism of his jaw and then i saw that from his lower lip if you could call it a lip grim wet and weaponlike hung five old pieces of fish line or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth a green line frayed at the end where he broke it two heavier lines and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering a five haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw i stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange the sun cracked thwarts the oarlocks on their strings the gunnelsuntil everything was rainbow rainbow rainbow and i let the fish go 9