When the fish is dead, it lies in the shallow of water that never goes away, in the dirt, the remnants of blood from my forefinger where I pricked myself four times over, maybe some from that pike, too.…
When I turned sixteen, I moved from Sweden to Tennessee. At that time, I deeply underestimated the rift that would form between me and my home country—and not just in terms of distance. There is a very peculiar yearning that happens when you have a place you love, that you desperately want to return to, and you don’t know when you’ll be able to. I haven’t had the chance to visit Sweden in five years, and as of now I still don’t know when I will be able to.
While I haven’t been fishing in Graninge for many years, those memories remain some of my most vivid ones. I think there’s a photo of me as a three-year-old holding up a pike that’s roughly the size of my entire body, but I don’t look all that excited about it. That wasn’t the pike that ended up getting roughhoused by the birds, but it was one of many that ended up in my dad’s boat during those early summer mornings when we’d watch the water grow completely unmoving, the rippling wake from the boat fading, too. I wanted to share that very magical moment in time while not shying away from what was often a pretty bloody ordeal (without even commenting on the smell). But I couldn’t write about fishing without writing about my father. In recent years, a tough realization to swallow has been the fact that even though I don’t see him every day, time will pass for him as it does for me. I can hoard these glossy pictures of him in my memory-box as much as I want, but every year spent apart from my father is still a year spent apart.
I often see my writing lead me back to that distance between who I was ten years ago, and what my relationship was to the world I lived in then, and who I am now. These changes are little threads I will sit and pick at until a line or phrase will glue itself to me and refuse to let go (“fishes graveyarding” in the case of this piece). Originally, I wrote “Mangled Pike Spotted by Kiddie Pool” for a class at William Paterson University in the spring of 2024, and at that time it was written in the second-person point of view. After two rounds of edits by my peers and professor, I rewrote it in first person, though I was reluctant at first. While the second-person point of view still holds a special place in my heart, reliving this story in first person made the heart of this piece become more evident to me: something invisible I could take hold of.
FAYE WIKNER is an MFA student and graduate assistant at William Paterson University of New Jersey. She is an editorial assistant at Map Literary and a prose reader for The Adroit Journal. Find her poetry at The Rumen, and find her on Twitter @userxofy.
