He stood there, but he didn't say anything; although there wasn't a soul around, he felt the need to speak. After what seemed like decades, he moved his lips but still remained muted. Finally, like an oral paraplegic, he stopped in the middle of an O. His mind raced along with this insinuation, until finally his words overlapped with his thoughts until they were synchronous.
"I love the outdoors."
Before he could expel the next few letters forming one word in his head, he looked to the right and steadied his aim for his fishing pole. One weathered in usage and permanent in his memory. He picks up a stone and throws it, aiming across the lake, skipping it from one place to another, filing the earlier evidences in a larger response but more diminutive the latter they come. His life operated itself according to these rules, and nothing in the last twenty years that happened to Edward was memorable or meaningful. He relished in thoughts of his youth. He watched the water, looking left, then right, such as a man looking to cross a street. Next, he formed his disposition to find a larger rock; one of the life of a man who lived fast and died young.
He reminisced about his father and their fishing trips, wondering if his life would end with any grand splashes or if he had played out all of his fate in his earlier years. He grabs the fishing pole and lingers for a few minutes before sitting down, inaugurating the day. He grabs the bait box and pauses to look at the variety of man. The natural and the artificial all playing against each other, working for the same goal.
He plays his fingers across all the different eclectic pieces of lures that adorn his tackle box and wonders what he would be like if he only looked better but wasn't real. Would people like him more, or is it just the lust of a fish wanting sustenance only to find out those among us are not real. Do people prefer the authentic or is everyone just another victim of plastic surgery? He opens the live bait and notices its vibrance only to fall to an opinion that the real is greater than its counterpart, and he slowly kills the nightcrawler by piercing it in several positions, only wondering of it now. Is it too fake this second, after his slaying? For the fish, he knows it is not. But a fish is not a man and human's instincts take nuance.
He flips his reel then wonders like a man thinking outer space to be liquid and just what it was like up there, what the underneath of the water will look with his instrument purposed and how it will be dangling through the water. He is able to view through the eyes of a fish in his mind and creates the greatest of casts, further down, just as he did when he was younger. He had been fishing this lake since a boy, and he often would try to imagine what it looked like down there. The graveyard of bait and lures, macabre and still only garbage to its wildlife. Only no one would be coming to pick up its pieces.
As the parabola ended itself as the end of the line caught into the water, he brought the slack and slightly reeled the line inward before sighing, and his motion replaced him where he had been many times before for long periods, only for him to romanticize of its monotony. Where the day had started, he would spend most of it in the same position he had if he remained to his home.
He squeezed the pole so hard as if he were trying to eliminate the space between it and his fingers and he competed with the air. It was cold and everything was stuck to the others as if it were only one giant piece, and nothing existed because everything existed together. Unlike things that happen by men's hands, this wholeness happened when men left things still. That's why he was taking his anger out on the pole, to stop the dirtying of the canvas. Every step he made, every move he uttered, and even every word he spoke dug into the ethos of the painting. Squeezing that pole let something into the air only the blind see, but it changes the rules. It changed the rules from that of a beneficiary to one of responsibility. If someone were there to see him, it would have scared them.
He wonders out loud, "What did it do to the one who made the scenery? I think he would like it. He knows my intent. To man, I could be..." You could barely see it, but the ground was changed the path he took from his truck to the lake. He gazes upon its meaning and settles for loosening the pole, but he wondered how his rocks changed the floor of the lake and pondered upon the droplets the body of water is made of and knows his skipping of them changed the water. He wonders how it changed the air. He wonders of the fish he will catch and how it's different than man.
He says out loud, "It's like the artificial. Always. No free will to muster. No responsibility to acquire. Only action without a mirror. The mirror of free will. It follows man around everywhere he goes. The rock I threw is closer to man now. An instrument of my will forever placed upon a superimposed concept of responsibility. That rock is now an extension of me."
Aggressively but slowly ascending his head upward he surprises himself and finds meaning in a Rorschach test of authorship. Is there any competition against the immediate foreground and its higher counterpart, or do they dance together, one large sculpture? The daytime sky is like a curtain always closed by the trapping of the sun's light reflecting the grandeur of the stage in its expansive swath expounding the perception of where we live, but blinding the actor to his habitat unable to see the forest for one large tree.
When the sun will settle and he will have killed a few of something fake will when the curtain is pulled he have more insight into his author looking at the forest, or will their quantity be swallowed by quality him drifting to a time past when all scenes were demonstrations of or reminders of the choice.
He thinks, "There is no dance between the fish and I. There is no meaning in the stars and realizes all humanity is informed upon itself in the presence of another, and the true painting is where men rely on an infinitude of possible stories. The real meaning lies in what you don't choose and his children dance with him. Oh, they dance." The End