The Secret Goldfish. David Means
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DAVID MEANS
The Secret Goldfish
These short stories are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in them are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Fourth Estate
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
This edition published by Fourth Estate 2012
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate 2005
Copyright © David Means 2004
David Means asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Some of the stories in this book appeared in the following publications:
‘The Secret Goldfish’ in the New Yorker; ‘Lightning Man’ in Esquire; ‘It Counts as Seeing’ in Harper’s; ‘Sault Ste. Marie’ in Harper’s; ‘Blown from the Bridge’ and ‘A Visit from Jesus’ (as ‘Two Folktales from Michigan’) in Witness; ‘Elyria Man’ in McSweeney’s; ‘The Project’ in the Alaska Quarterly Review and Harper’s; ‘Carnie’ in Witness and The Best American Mystery Stories, 2001
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Source ISBN: 9780007164875
EBook Edition © JULY 2016 ISBN: 9780007405336 Version: 2016-07-25
To Genève
The pure products of America go crazy—
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
Contents
The first time, he was fishing with Danny. Fishing was a sacrament, and therefore, after the strike, when his head was clear, there was the blurry aftertaste of ritual: the casting of the spoon in lazy repetitions, the slow cranking, the utterance of the clicking reel, the baiting of the clean hook, and the cosmic intuitive troll for the deep pools of cool water beneath the gloss of a wind-dead afternoon. Each fish seemed to arrive as a miracle out of the silence: a largemouth bass gasping for air, gulping the sky, gyrating, twisting, turning against the leader’s force. But then he was struck by lightning and afterward felt like a fish on the end of the line. There was a paradigm shift: he identified purely—at least for a few months—with the fish, dangling, held by an invisible line tossed down from the heavens.
Lucy had languid arms and pearly-white skin—as smooth as the inside of a seashell, he liked to say—and he smelled, upon returning to the house on the Morrison farm one night, her peaty moistness on his fingers. He’d touched her—just swept his fingers into