Carnivore Dreams – The Love-Charr

This is an excerpt from a story first published in Gray’s Sporting Journal and will soon be anthologized again in a collection of Upper Peninsula fishing stories (though it’s a love story). If you want to read it and a lot of other stories you can purchase Seasonal Roads on Amazon–published by Wayne State University, my novel in stories. This will be a duplicate post today in Substack:

Published in Gray’s Sporting Journal

The Love-Charr

She doesn’t know, even now, if she believes in Big Fish.

Just when they were sure to land it, it’d jumped six feet in the air, scissored an enormous air-borne convulsion ripping the heart from her, and vanished into the tea-colored river.

Some fantastic pooka of the sea.

An omble de fontaine, a glaciated, monster coaster, a speckled ad fluvial sea trout.  Like Daniel Webster’s Devil Fish, it was a hump-backed Love-Charr of mythic proportions.

“Dreams and fishes are no more than wishes,” Sam had said.

“Hey, I’m no fisherman,” Aissa had answered back.

Maybe they’d dreamed it, after all. Big Fish had slipped through their fingers leaving emptiness, but also a pounding anticipation in the knowledge that it existed in these waters at all.  It had loomed large, like their passion for each other.

Once you see something like that, you want it.

Or you want to want it.