whose line is it anyway? {open//pm to join}

“Alright babe, just come back for lunch, will you?” my mother called through the screen door. I was already almost too far away to hear her over the clacking of the uneven wood on its door frame. I wondered if Dad would ever get around to fixing that--all it would take was a screwdriver to tighten the hinges near the top of the door—but at this point, it seemed unlikely. I knew I’d end up doing it myself at some point; if not today, then some other day. But for now, I was going fishing.

For my sixteenth birthday, about a year and a half ago, Dad bought me a fishing rod—a nice fiberglass one that was thick enough to catch a decent catfish without snapping, one that would last me a long time. At the time I’d thought it was a weird thing to get for a gift since I hadn’t really expressed much of an urge to fish—that had always been my dad’s thing. After the accident, though, he started taking me fishing with him more often than before. Maybe it was because he wanted to spend more time with me, or maybe he just thought he could force me into loving it the way he did. Maybe he felt vincible from his disability, and he wanted to teach me something else before he died (although hopefully that wouldn’t be for a long time). Maybe it was a combination of all three.

Somehow, he had succeeded at the second one. I couldn’t tell you how it happened, but I ended up looking forward to those weekend trips to the lake with my father, where we’d sit on the water’s edge in the muddy grass for hours waiting for a bite. Even when we didn’t catch anything, I enjoyed the peacefulness of it—the water lapping against the bank, its endless ripples splitting the sunlight, the call of the mourning doves (hoo-ah! hooo hooo hooo. They sound like owls, sort of.). By the lake, time stood still.

Needless to say, Lily didn’t feel the same way about fishing. My younger sister hated the earthy smell of the fish water and they way you always got mud on your shoes no matter how hard you tried to avoid it. There was no convincing her to even look at an earthworm, let alone put one on a hook. She would gag at the way it wriggled, or complain about killing an innocent animal. And she always had to pee after she sat by the water for about fifteen minutes max. While I’d been digging in the backyard with a trowel for worms, she’d sat on the back porch, eyeing me disapprovingly over the pages of her book. She was always reading. Maybe it was a phase.

The lake sat a good ways beyond our property, maybe two miles down the gravel road that connected our farmhouse to the Square in the center of the district. The walk was pretty far if you went on foot the way Dad and I usually did (it was too hard to carry a fish bucket on horseback), but it was worth it—the trout from this lake tasted a hundred times better than the ones you could catch in the polluted streams that bordered the edges of our pastures. Mother says you can get sick eating those fish, so we never bothered to try our luck there unless we were just fishing for sport. Which, for lack of free time, we hardly ever did.

When I finally reached the lake, the sun had just risen over the edge of the water, painting the surface with the shadows of the surrounding trees. This was a good time to go fishing—when the world wasn’t quite awake yet, and the fish nudged lazily at the surface of the water, looking for bugs. I figured I probably had about two hours before I’d have to start back towards the house for lunch.

I sat on a big rock and laid my fish bucket and can of worms beside me. On the ground I saw a twig, and I broke off the part that looked the most like a Y, sticking it in the mud to use as a pole stand.

Just as I was about to cast my line into the shade of the trees, I heard footsteps behind me. I didn’t know who it was but I figured it didn’t matter; I wouldn’t mind having some company anyways. I went ahead and flicked my wrist, watching the worm on its hook fly in an arc and plop! into the water. Then I gave the line a little slack and propped the pole up against the makeshift stand.

“You can join me, if you want. S’long as you promise not to scare the fish,” I told my guest, smiling so they'd know I wouldn’t bite.


[[ooc: please pm me first if you'd like to join. I'm open to plot suggestions if you have any ^^]]