For the first two months in Marathon, he’d wake up at dawn, wade out in the flats up to his navel, cast the Tarpon Toad fly toward the five or six monsters at the fifteenth pylon of the dock, about two hours, a hundred casts or so, fifty-eight days, well, you do the math. Not a single bite or follow. It didn’t matter. At the same time, the neighbor walked back and forth in the ocean, to his left, from the neighbor’s own dock to another dock a football field away. Neither said a word. The neighbor, ten years younger, was likely in his early seventies, more fit, maybe Poseidon, a colossus. He took to counting the neighbor’s laps, 7, 18, 23, 35, finally 50. He’d stop his back and forth casts, then, so that together they left the ocean.
Until it got cold, those last two weeks, first 50s, then 40s, finally mid 30s at night. When the iguanas dropped from the trees, upside down and stiff, he righted them. Not his neighbor. Net after net of rigid iguanas the neighbor carried to the end of the dock, dumping the frozen lizards into the ocean. Nothing swirled to eat them. Would the warmer water wake them from their comas, mid-drown, gasping? With his untreated sleep apnea, he understood. He called animal control. Nothing illegal about killing iguanas. Invasive species. Spread disease. Destroy things. But the ocean? Well, not encouraged. Most people use 22s or 25s.
On maybe the fifteenth or twentieth trip of the neighbor’s lizard dumping, he stood at the fence, waiting for the Colossus. He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Frost wrote of a neighbor, a poem he’d taught in the long ago. Before the Great Leaving, wife, kids, both dogs, teaching.
“Is she gone too?” he asked him. By “she,” he meant the neighbor’s wife. By “gone,” he meant left, not dead.
Colossus held the net over his head like a spear, the thickened skin of residents. He kept walking. To Colossus, the man at the fence was a snowbird, a ghost.
“You don’t have to dump them,” he called after Colossus.
The neighbor bent down, picked up a pebble, hurled it. It bounced off his temple.
Later, on the plane, the kid next to him—a digital marketer who created spam—pointed at the knot on his forehead.
She took out her ear buds. “My dad,” she said, “always would joke ‘You should see the other guy.’” She returned the ear buds.
Yes, you should. The other guy waded through the dead iguanas as he did his daily laps, back and forth, back and forth, ad infinitum, not a care in the world.
~
Randall Brown has been published and anthologized widely. He served as the Director for the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Rosemont College, as a reader, editor, and Lead Editor at Smokelong Quarterly, and as a judge for numerous flash fiction awards, including Rose Metal Press’ annual chapbook contest. He is also the founder and managing editor of Matter Press and its Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. He received his MFA in Fiction from Vermont College.