Assistant Editor Michael Alessi: Like the reel the father wields in this flash-fiction story, Nicholas Mainieri’s angular prose clicks and angles for the mysteries that linger below the surface of experience and memory. What starts as a familiar scene between father and son plunges deeper, revealing the connections that root us to the world, with a final paragraph that gracefully leaves the reader on the hook with their stomach in their mouth.
To hear Nicholas read the story, click below:
Snapper
They tie to the platform down current so the Gulf won’t pull them into the machinery. The unmanned rig shrieks on a timer, its peal pressing into the boy’s brain, squeezing out all else; his father explains that this is to alert tankers to the platform’s presence in low visibility.
“Has to be loud enough for that.”
The sound rings in the boy’s eardrums and then fades.
The mooring rope creaks, taut across the gunwale.
His father’s reel clicks.
The boy watches for sea turtles because he has a book about them at his mother’s. Greens and leatherbacks and loggerheads and hawksbills. He’ll know which on sight.
The rig shrieks again.
Countless other scaffolds bristle gray on the horizon. All of them out there screaming.
They must be.
Nor had the boy foreseen how a red snapper’s stomach would swell and bulge from its mouth once they got it into the boat. It makes his own stomach feel the same, like he might puke.
“They in that cold deep water,” his father says. “Pull ’em up too fast and it’s like scuba divers with the air bubbles in their blood—you know what I’m talking about?”
No, the boy doesn’t. Not that. What he sees instead is how there’s a world above you. How maybe there’s always a world above you. Worlds upon worlds, each as real as anything. Separate worlds, each there without you. They don’t need you, and they don’t need you to know. But then you do, lip on a hook. Next world up. Can’t work the other way. Next world. It’s yours now, too.
Nicholas Mainieri is the author of the novel The Infinite (Harper Perennial, 2016). He holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and currently lives with his family in the Midwest, where he works at the University of Notre Dame.
For more miCRo pieces, CLICK HERE
