Thursday
The town's been mumbling about the sleet weather so much you'd think winter would last 365 days this year. The day after that Wednesday is a mild melancholy morning. It started with the dew of rain, a swift sprinkle to sweetly bless the soft morning.
The seagulls bluntly cutting into the gray haze circling the quarry crying above the voices of the stead quail. The call of the misfit birds is awkward and roughening without the company of the seas torrent, there was no barrage of white crests, salt whipping on pearl and rock, volatile and masterful. The soaring gulls like bleak pigeons in a coal sky. Somewhere in the yellow thicket a bird whoops repeatedly like the lashing of a bull whip. Sprawling along the length of the water a green nested pier opens access to the nature scene. Men gather in dusty ball caps, rough jeans their leathery hands toting rods and tackle. Their voices low but barking, excited by the commune of nature. A small group collects around a silver choking fish. The other men shift on the space of the deck shoving rough hands in worn collapsed coat pockets. The great gulls are gone. They had coated their feathers in the cool gray and shirted their underbellies in wet waiting water, for a moment, clustered and routinely dunked under the sky and beckoned by some invisible whispering wind, set off one by one. The men smother their cigarettes and wipe their hands partly from the blood of the fish and they too set off from the breach of the land.
