AFTER THE WAR

By LC McCahon

Part 4

Sandy had washed the tea set, and reclaimed it as part of the household goods. Maurice, afraid another transplant would kill the violets, didn’t challenge this. Janice wondered if they would ever have a tea ceremony again in which Sandy and Maurice talked to each other.

Janice had her own problems. The hens and the ducks had started mating with each other. While she was pretty sure there would be no offspring, this had never happened before and it worried her. She had read years ago that the sperm of one species just couldn’t survive in the reproductive tract of the other, but whether that was duck-on-chicken or chicken-on-duck or both she couldn’t remember. There probably would be no offspring, but if the females were fertilised or simply stimulated correctly less often then there would be even fewer eggs. She wondered if this new behaviour was some sort of symptom of post-traumatic stress.

John was having some luck however. The stream at the base of the hill was providing more and more eels, and watercress, and he was able to bring back a substantial dinner or some sort more and more often. This was also an excellent sign for the increasing health of the stream. Eventually, he hoped, there might actually be other major fish species in the river. He figured there must be some other fish already for the eels to eat, but he never seemed to see or catch any.

One early autumn day, as the sun slowly peeked over the trees, and John was waiting with rod in hand for the first, and hopefully not the last, bite of the day, he felt a quiver in the rod. Expectantly, he tugged, and was rewarded with a surge of pulling that took his line further downstream. The murky water showed him nothing, and the stream wasn’t very deep, so he figured he’d have the fish out soon enough. But the next tug almost took the rod out of his hands, and when he held on tighter it helped jerk him to his feet. Now he was concerned. What creature in this little piece of water could have the strength to do that? As he stood bracing himself on the bank with legs akimbo, all his old fears returned, with an almost superstitious foreboding. He couldn’t help but think of mutant fish, turned ugly and huge with the war’s poisons, reeking of radiation and chemicals, grown cancerous and giant, coming to seek their revenge for all their brethren he’d eaten over the years. As the tugging forced him to lurch downstream along the bank just to keep his balance, his alarm increased, until he found himself yelling,

“I’ve looked after the stream! I never ate too many of you! And I’ve done everything I can to keep the water clean and encourage more life back to the old river system! I used to take only one fish a month in order to let the stocks build back up! We never took more than you could give while coming back, and never more than we needed! Please, please forgive me! I’m a friend to the river! We need each other to survive! Oh God have Mercy!”

His rod gave another lurch and he fell forward onto a mound of grass, and with his full weight immobilised the yanker could seem to yank him no further; the pull remained on the rod, but he remained stationary. Terrified, his brain freaking out at the contradiction between the strength on the line and the depth of the water, he lay there gasping, half-winded from his fall, staring in horror at where the line entered the current.

What do you want to have happen next?