Sightings, and: Fixitive, and: Flounder Gigging

Abstract

Sightings I see my father rarely now, but always from an odd angle – in a crowd, say, disappearing in a cold rain or, as today, in drifting flurries while I was waiting to cross Fifth, and always for only two or three seconds, him going by in the back seat of a black car and breath comes hard all over again after years. [End Page 161] Fixitive Winter nights, after dinner, I go out into the dark, hoping for something bright to hold the day. I take the salt marsh path that leads to the wide waters of Bogue Sound. Sometimes I return with a wash of stars in my head. Or the antiphonal hoots of barred owls that have built their sound fence in hi-lo's for maybe a mile. Tonight there were no stars. A cottony mist hung over the trees like a tent. Just a soft slapping of waves at the point. But on the return, from the road in front of my house, I heard a panic of squeaks in the pampas grass. My flashlight lit the cats, Mel and Tootie, torturing a mouse that they left by turns, coming to my feet for strokes and scratches until the mouse escaped – likely to our shed where the lucid dark of my desklamp shows him still, entering this room from a hole in the wall, uncertain at first, sniffing left then right, as if looking for a switch. But that's me, not him, looking for a light. He scurries for birdseed in the torn sack, then burrows to sleep in my garden glove. [End Page 162] Flounder Gigging Along the channel edges, flats and shoals, even with an underwater light you find them hard to see. They must pretend they're sandy bottom with a concentration so complete they disappear into what becomes them.