Not Catching The Óengus Trout

More about Not Catching The Óengus Trout

I stayed up all night tying flies for the Angus trout. The lamp on my desk was the moon on disability.

The first materials came from my hypnagogic state, little fluffy things that fell off the edge of sleep like dandelion seeds. I caught them with trembling fingers and twisted them onto the hook.

Then I added feathers from a prophetic dream. A strange bird had flown through my sleep the week before, shouting advice I didn’t write down. When I woke, three feathers were on my pillow. They looked like they belonged to a creature that had once been in a choir and then quit.

The tail was the hard part. Some creepy green goo oozed out of an abyss under my bed, the kind you get when you overuse your subconscious. I pulled a long thread from it, shining and sick, and wound it into a poisonous tail.

For the hackle I uncorked a bottle of astro light I’d been saving since adolescence. I’d kept it beside my bed in case the universe needed a flashlight. Overnight it had turned into red salamander feathers.

Last came the thread of the thing, gossamer made from barnacle beards and old sentence diagrams. High school English came back in a chalky wave: slanted lines, arrows, the teacher wiring words to invisible poles. Even then it felt flimsy next to Noam Chomsky’s universal language, which also wasn’t strong enough to tie the whiskey parts of dreams together.

So I used a different grammar, the one that happens when a word hits your eardrum and explodes into meaning before you can defend yourself. That was my real tying thread. I wrapped it tight around the hook until the whole thing held.

When I finished, the fly was a big flamboyant creature, like something left over from a small-town Mardi Gras. It looked ridiculous and absolutely correct.

I took my fly rod and walked down to the slow river, the one that is always trying and failing to become a rapid, the water whiskey-colored and tannic from the bog upstream.

I cast the dream-fly into the brown current. It landed with the soft plop of an old secret. For a moment nothing happened and I thought maybe I had finally managed to out-weird even the fish.

Then there was a flash.

The line went tight and I felt the Angus trout on the other end. The hook set deep.

And then, just as suddenly, the fish threw the hook and swam away, leaving only ripples and the aftertaste of almost.

Another dream lost, I thought, but a small knot of knowledge gained, tugging quietly at the edge of my sleep.