Brad Kester

He skipped a stone across the stream and was surprised that it only skipped once before sinking into the deep. He tried another, a flatter one with smooth edges. Much better, he thought, this one will skip better.

At the campsite he broke some twigs to get the fire started. After the twigs would come the big logs, he had already chopped some up with his hatchet, they’d been waiting there all day to shed their molecules in a blaze of fire. The man would use it to cook the fish he had caught.

It was all the same. Hunting and eating, sleeping, waking up, cleaning and sharpening knives, boiling the water from the stream to make it drinkable. Even the hikes he took every once in a while to the summit were a thing of routine, a mundane god-awful waste of time.

When the kindling had caught, he placed a couple of the big ones in the fire pit, leaning them against one another to make a tipi. That way air could flow beneath them and keep the fire healthy, a fire needs oxygen to stay alive. He could see part of the tipi starting to slide out of place and instinctively he reached out. “Ah, stupid,” he growled when his hand was burned. He knew he’d have a blister in the morning, but it wasn’t anything serious, just some minor pain he’d have to deal with until it healed. It was stupid, though, he should not have reached out his hand like that, he knew better.

He put the fish out on a big flat rock and let it sizzle there until the fire worked into it, making it dry, making it change color. While it cooked he went to the bushes and took a leak and then the stream to rinse his hands. He thought he had some salt and pepper left somewhere in a little shaker.

The fish tasted good. Not the best he’d ever caught, and certainly not the biggest, but it was satisfying to him. He picked his teeth and burned the fish skin until it became anonymous ash among the embers and coal. Somehow, strangely, the eye of the fish and part of its face around the mouth refused to burn up in the flame. It stayed there intact, clinging to the side of the log, no longer a functioning organ, no longer capable of sight. The man was tempted several times to poke it with a stick and move it to a hotter place in the fire, to put it out of its misery. But he never did. He didn’t move at all. He just sat there. Was it the fish’s misery or his own misery that he felt when he looked into that mutilated body, the eye?

Waste of time.

He put another log into the pit and let the fire blaze on. The stars were out now, and the moon was a million miles away. He moved closer to the flames to keep his chest warm and rubbed his shoulders back and forth with his hands to make friction. But he kept staring at the eye that wouldn’t burn up, somehow feeling sick to his stomach about it all. He thought about death a lot in those days and wasn’t quite sure why, or how, or when it would come to him. When the fire had flickered out he got into his tent, zipped into his sleeping bag, and tried to go to sleep.

Until late hours: Grown men discussing common perplexities.