It was Saturday morning and his uncle was taking him fishing. Aflatoon Samarkar woke up and looked outside. He felt like he was already fishing. The day was different. The sun and the street and his yard were not anything outside of him. He was inside all of them because he was going fishing, and that was inside everything.

His mother and father were still asleep, and he liked it that way. His father did not know about fishing. He knew about poems. Aflatoon knew that his father stayed up late at night trying to write poems and he was excited for the day when he would write poems himself, but it was far away. It wasn’t like fishing. You couldn’t wake up in the morning and already be doing it when you looked outside.

Aflatoon ate a small breakfast. He heard his uncle’s car outside and felt an excitement as big as fear. How could he really join that world of people who had gone fishing? The ones who sat, back against a tree, with their fishing pole; a piece of grass in their mouth and hat pulled down low. Aflatoon wasn’t wearing a hat but that didn’t matter. He would still be joining them, but he worried that there wouldn’t be much left of life after doing something as great as fishing.

His uncle came inside, with his funny mustache, and Aflatoon knew that his uncle had gone fishing many times. His Uncle knew how to be happy about the thing he had done many times, and Aflatoon breathed a sigh of relief. His uncle was part of the world of people who had gone fishing easily, and that helped a lot.

“The philosopher-king!” his uncle said, “is your father asleep?”

“Yes.”

“That is because he doesn’t know about fish.”

Aflatoon liked it when his uncle talked like that because they were brothers and brothers could do that. He didn’t have a brother, but still understood it.

Aflatoon ran upstairs where his mother and father were sleeping, and since his mother looked closer to waking up, he told her that his uncle was here, and they were going to go.

“Did you eat something?”

“Yes,” he said like a guy who knew that you should eat breakfast before going fishing.

On the way to the lake, Aflatoon sat in the backseat of his uncle’s car and his uncle told him stories about his father when he was a boy. It was unbelievable that his father had once been a boy, but his uncle was proof of it. When Aflatoon spoke, he sounded like his father when he had been a boy.

The world was awfully big, but a guy who was going fishing could cut right through the middle of the whole thing; to the place that was the best place to go. He liked the way that fishing was in between playing and working. He thought of the kids on his block and how they would be waking up and going out to the street to see what they could do, and he felt proud that he already knew.

At the lake they walked out onto a dock. There was no tree to sit against, but that was all right. Fishing was flexible, and he felt his imagination could catch up to what it actually turned out to be.

The water was very still. Aflatoon had never seen it like that before. The water had never felt like so much of a thing that he was a part of, even when he had gone swimming in it. When swimming, he didn’t have to care about what was in it. He only had to care about himself. Fishing was like caring about everything.

His uncle showed him how he tied the hook to the line. He put a red ball on the line, and he explained that it would keep the bait where it needed to be. He put a maggot on the hook. The maggot was alive. Aflatoon thought about how fishing was still the whole beautiful lake as he watched the maggot wriggle on the hook.

His uncle cast the line. It was beautiful to watch him do it. It looked just like fishing. They were really there. They were at that place where fishing was, and it was real and alive.

“Now we wait,” his uncle said.

Aflatoon leaned back against an imaginary tree and pulled an imaginary hat down over his eyes. Everything else was real though. The sun, and the lake, and the fishing line, and the belief in something under the surface. You couldn’t actually go down there and see everything, but you could sit back on the dock and believe in it. His uncle believed in what was happening down there. He didn’t write poems the way his father did, but it still made sense to Aflatoon that they were brothers. They liked to tease each other, but it was because they liked each other. For himself, he leaned on the side of fishing. His father looked sad sometimes when he was writing poems. His uncle did not look sad fishing.

They sat for a while and then something happened and the lake was still calm except for one spot where it wasn’t calm at all. In that spot a fish came out of the water swinging around like nothing he had ever seen before.

“We got one, Affie!” his uncle said.

Aflatoon couldn’t believe that something so wild could come out of something so calm. And he understood that the only way something could look so wild was if it was trying to live. He felt very old to understand it, but he did not want to feel so old. He wanted to feel like who he had been just a moment before.

His uncle was happy.

“Look at him!” he said. The fish was dead now, and Aflatoon felt sorry for it. He felt guilty for what they had done, but he couldn’t show it in front of his uncle.

His uncle caught two more fish. Aflatoon was quiet, and he was quiet in the car on the way home. It wasn’t until they got home, and his mother and father asked him how it was that he said it:

“I wanted to go fishing,” Aflatoon said, “I didn’t want to kill a fish!”

His uncle looked at his father. His father looked very calm.

“You wanted to go fishing?” his father asked.

“Yes!”

“What is fishing?” his father asked.

“Fishing is just fishing!” Aflatoon said, “Everybody knows what fishing is!”

“What does a person do when they fish?” his father asked.

Aflatoon wanted to tell them about the tree and the hat pulled down low, but he didn’t want to have to tell it. It would ruin it to say it out loud. He didn’t like being a kid and having to be the one to tell them what fishing was. But it helped that his father was ready to listen. He could see that it was true just how his father had once been a boy.

“They don’t kill any fish, that’s for sure!” Aflatoon said.

It felt good to be the angriest person in the room. Aflatoon had never seen his uncle look so surprised before. 

Well, Aflatoon thought, now you know how I felt when we killed that fish.

 “Ohhh,” his father said, as if he was just understanding something, “You’re talking about fishing.”

“Yes,” Aflatoon said.

“I had it mixed up in my head with something else,” his father said, “yes, of course. Fishing.”

Aflatoon looked around at everybody and it didn’t seem so important then to be the angriest person in the room.

“We can go fishing,” his father said, “I didn’t realize that’s what you were talking about.”

Aflatoon looked at his uncle and felt bad. His uncle had tried to take him fishing. It just hadn’t been it.

His uncle looked at his father and laughed, “You have been writing poems,” he said.

“Yes,” his father said.

“I thought so. Well, you can’t eat poems. Take one of these fish.”

“Thank you. We will take one of the fish that you did not catch fishing.”

His uncle laughed, “Of course. We did not catch these fishing at all. I think they will be very good to eat, but we certainly did not catch them fishing.”

Aflatoon felt glad that his father and his uncle were brothers. When they were together, they didn’t have to make him understand that the thing he and his uncle had done was fishing, even though he knew somewhere deep inside himself that it was. They were brothers and they loved each other, and they could tease each other, and they could make him understand that it was fishing later.

Aflatoon couldn’t admit that had been fishing back there. He just thought the thing he thought was fishing was real too. It had come from somewhere. And it had been a kind of fishing that had life in it. It had life in the beginning, and life in the middle, and life in the end. Because otherwise the only other way was to have life in the beginning and death at the end, and that just seemed ridiculous; that seemed like nothing men would ever arrange in the world on purpose, not if they could do something that had life all the way through.