Fin

The smell of morning floated across the water, buoyed beneath the sky. It reminded her of old times. She could taste it--taste the silence in her mouth. The fish floated halfway between the buoy and the water, its fin wedged beneath the styrofoam. "What's it doing?" the girl had asked her father, and he said someone probably threw it back in after fishing. That was what; that was how. "She's gone now, the poor old girl," he said. "She won't wake up now". And that's how it was. She couldn't wake up. She won't.

Someone had thrown a styrofoam cup in the water. It floated across, buoyed by the salty water. Probably an old coffee cup. Beneath the cold, morning sky was a feeling that asked of what was gone. A feeling of silence, of cold, a feeling that reminded her of waking up at her father's in the poor times. A feeling wedged halfway between waking and doing, the smell of coffee, a salty taste in her mouth.