The fog was thick and the air dewy that morning by the coast. The old fisherman cast his line over the end of the pier, the same one he had returned to ever since he was young. The pier’s wooden boards were rotten, their once-rich browns having long since turned to sickly grays and greens. The old fisherman had crept past the graffiti-streaked skeletal storefront facades, crowbar and fishing rod tucked tight under his arm, to where he now sat, in a battered old folding chair, avoiding the boards he knew could no longer support his weight. With his line piercing the water’s surface, the old fisherman was at peace.

​

The sound of creaking footsteps along the pier pulled the old fisherman from his bliss. He whipped around in his seat, nearly toppling over, but saw nothing through the fog. He shook his head, telling himself it had simply been the struts of the pier creaking as they were struck by the lapping waves. The old fisherman returned his focus to rod and reel, and the footsteps continued. He ignored them. The footsteps were so delicately soft that they could only belong to some light-footed animal; one time, a deer had slipped through the gate and snuck onto the pier, enticed by the smell of the food he carried—a sandwich in a plastic baggie, stuffed into one of his pants pockets. Ever since, he had made sure to wedge the rusted chain link gate shut behind him. The old fisherman continued in his task as the footsteps in the fog approached softly, gently, until they were at his side.

​

A stranger unfolded a chair of his own and sat down next to the old fisherman, who scoffed and shook his head, disgusted that this stranger would not only intrude on his privacy, but choose to sit where he did, with a whole pier for the two of them to share. As the stranger got comfortable and reared back a fishing rod of his own, the old fisherman turned to demand that he find his own spot and saw the black cloak the stranger wore, the dark hood shrouding his face, and the hands that emerged from his cloak—emaciated, pale yellow, and each sporting six talon-tipped fingers adorned with many rings.

​

“Oh,” the old fisherman half-said, half-exhaled. The sound had been involuntary. He never believed that the end would come so soon. He always thought that he would have more time. The stranger cast his line.

​

“Have you caught anything today?” asked the stranger, his voice low, rich, and quite kind. The old fisherman shook his head. His hands trembled and a bead of sweat trickled down the back of his neck. “That’s a shame,” the stranger said.

​

The old fisherman wondered why he had made such a remark, if perhaps the stranger to his left had hoped the old fisherman’s final day would yield something worthwhile. He supposed that the stranger must not have been watching him all that closely as of late.

​

“I figured you were onto something, that you had a reason for coming out here every week,” the stranger continued. “But I guess not. So, why here? Why not the nice new pier down the way? There’s more people there, it’s farther from the factories, the water’s clear—”

​

“Am I going to die?” the old fisherman asked, his jaw trembling.

​

“Well, yeah,” said the stranger. “Eventually.” He let out a soft chuckle. “Everyone’s free pass expires one day.”

​

“B-but,” the old fisherman stammered, “n-not today?”
 

“Nah,” said the stranger, lounging back in his seat. It was a folding chair, much like the old fisherman’s but with a brand new price tag still hanging off the side—seventy-seven dollars. “Today’s my day off.” The old fisherman eyed him suspiciously. “Relax,” the stranger said with a laugh, patting the fishing rod clutched in his claws. “This doesn’t look like a scythe to you, does it?”

​

“No,” the old fisherman said, the firmness in his voice restored, “I suppose it doesn’t.” He cleared his throat, returned his sights to the sea, and quelled the shaking in his hands.

​

“Why’re you here, then?” the old fisherman asked gruffly. With the fear of death smothered, his frustration with the stranger’s over-familiarity and choice of seat reared its head once again.

​

“To fish,” the stranger said, a quizzical lilt to his voice. “Why else?”

​

The old fisherman grumbled and hoped for a fish to bite at the end of his line, anything to keep him from a conversation with the stranger. The stranger’s line tugged instead, and he reeled in a long-dead fish, its eyes collapsed and its putrid, gluey flesh barely holding its bones together.

​

“Oh, that’s unpleasant,” the stranger said to himself, yanking his hook from the corpse’s lower lip and tossing the fish back into the drink. The old fisherman shook his head as the stranger cast his line again. For the next half hour, they sat in silence. The old fisherman caught nothing, the stranger two more dead fish.

​

“This place is quite beautiful,” said the stranger. The old fisherman grunted, immediately unsure whether he had done so in agreement with the stranger or out of frustration for the silence having been broken.

​

“It’s such a rarity for a place like this to exist,” the stranger continued, “so full of stories yet so devoid of life. The world as it has become does not allow such places to last, so ruthlessly intent on tearing them down and replacing them with something new.” The old fisherman briefly considered moving his seat, but he quickly smothered the thought. He had to remain here. This was where he belonged.

​

“For the brief time in which places such as this are permitted to linger,” the stranger trailed on, “they are indeed beautiful, but they are so very lonely. I live among the lifeless; in this way, these places are the closest that I have to a home.” He looked towards the old fisherman, whose watchful eyes remained upon the foggy sea. “An existence of solitude is never pleasant,” said the stranger. “I want to know what it is like for you, an impermanent vessel of life, to likewise live within a lifeless land.”

​

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the old fisherman grumbled irritably. “There’s plenty of life here.”

​

The stranger turned in his chair and looked back at the pier they had both walked down. He pointed with a talon towards the burned-out remains of a building, its crumbling and ashen face tattooed with graffiti. “That building there,” the stranger asked, “where is the life in it?” The old fisherman glanced where the stranger pointed before returning his sights to the sea.

​

“That was the restaurant where I took my first girlfriend,” the old fisherman said. “We were both… fifteen, I’d say. We sat and talked and ate for hours that day, till it was closing time and we were made to leave.”

​

“Hm,” the stranger responded, curling his extended hand and continuing to scan the pier. He stopped and pointed out a corpse-like building at the far end of the boardwalk, a wooden ribcage looming out of the fog. “How about that building? Where is the life in it?”

​

“That was where my dad bought me my first sunhat,” the old fisherman said without turning around, already knowing where the stranger had pointed. “I hadn’t wanted to get up early that morning, so the fog had already burned off, but I wanted to go fishing anyways, and dad didn’t want me to get burned too.” Despite himself, the old fisherman smiled faintly, the edges of gray teeth peeking out from behind his leathery lips. “It didn’t work too well—came home looking like a damn lobster. Mom screamed her head off at the both of us.”

​

“This is what I mean,” said the stranger. “What you have told me are stories, memoirs in your impermanent mind, but they are not signs of life.” The smile faded from the old fisherman’s face. “Tell me,” the stranger asked, “where is your father?”

​

“He’s gone,” the old fisherman said softly. “You took him some years back.”

​

“Yes,” said the stranger, voice vacant and devoid of pleasure. “I did. Quite a fighter, that one.” The old fisherman nodded proudly.

​

“And your girlfriend,” asked the stranger, “the one you brought here all those years ago? Do you know where she is now?”

​

“I don’t,” muttered the old fisherman, his voice rough and raspy. “Haven’t for a long time now.”

​

“Would you like to?”

​

“I… ” The old fisherman paused, then slowly shook his head, his eyes down towards his feet. The stranger had nothing to tell him.

​

“Very well,” said the stranger.

​

The two sat in silence for some time before the stranger asked the old fisherman, “Why do you come here? You never did give me an answer.”

​

“It’s quiet,” the old fisherman said simply. “I like the privacy.”

​

“You use a cane in your home and struggle to traverse the stairs, yet you risk your life each and every week atop these rickety planks simply to fish off the end of this pier, when another is not that far away. If you are sitting on this pier on the day in which it falls, you will not be able to escape.” The stranger sounded perplexed, nearly concerned. “Is all of that worth it just for some peace and quiet?”

​

“It is most days,” the old fisherman said gruffly.

​

“I get it,” said the stranger. “I get the hint.”

​

The two returned to fishing.

​

After a silent hour, as the stranger reeled in his eleventh dead fish, the old fisherman, who had yet to catch anything, glanced again towards the stranger, catching a glimpse of his knobby yellow fingers curled around his reel, before quickly averting his eyes.

​

“You’re still afraid that it’s your day,” the stranger said matter-of-factly, having noticed not only the fear in the old fisherman’s eyes each time he had looked the stranger’s way, but how seldom he had sought to do so. “You still believe that I’ve come for you.” The old fisherman nodded ruefully. 

​

“Give it a rest.” The stranger groaned exasperatedly. “Like I told you, today is my day off, and I can’t manage those all too often. I think the last one was before you were around. Would have been six hundred, six hundred fifty years ago.”

​

The old fisherman did not respond. He had indeed not been around, and neither had been anything that now surrounded them. The pier, the oil that stained the sand beneath it, the factories to the north that had pumped all of it out, the old fisherman’s father or his father, the whale skull that had washed up on shore half a decade ago, the crowd that the old fisherman knew packed the new pier down the way that morning and would continue to do so until late that evening, just as they did every day, none of it had been around or had even been conceived of the last time that the stranger had breathed easy for a day, a lone day, no more than a moment within his ages-long existence.

​

“So,” the old fisherman asked, keeping his eyes on the water, which had begun to turn a bluer hue as the fog burned away, “what do you want to talk about?” The stranger looked at the old fisherman for a moment, before he too turned his gaze to the sea.

​

“I want to talk about you,” said the stranger. “Souls are lonely, forlorn. They are seldom talkative by the time that they are with me, and on the rare occasion which they are, their words for me are far from pleasant. I want to know what a life is like. More than that, I want to know what your life is like—as I said, you are unusual for an impermanence, wishing to reside in such a place as this.”

​

“I… uh,” the old fisherman began haltingly. He had always seen himself as ordinary at best, a festering absence of nuance at worst. He was unsure of what he could offer to the record of life. Why, after hundreds of years, was the stranger wasting time with him? “I come here every week to go fishing. It’s peaceful. Quiet. I like that.” 

​

Another bite tugged at the end of the stranger’s line, and he reeled in a fish. It seemed alive at first to the old fisherman, the orange scales on its flat body vibrant and whole, but he then noticed the large gash in its stomach. It had been gutted before being thrown back into the water. The stranger plucked it from the hook, considered it for a moment, and threw it over the edge of the pier. He gestured for the old fisherman to continue.

​

“I’ve been coming here by myself for a while now,” the old fisherman said. “Over fifty years now… nearly sixty, actually. Once a week, I wake up at 5:30 and make myself a sandwich.” He gently patted the pocket on his left leg, where a sandwich baggie was stuffed. “For a while, I would work hard on this sandwich. A treat for myself after a long morning of fishing, y’know?” He pursed his lips. He had learned that, jammed in a plastic baggie in his pocket for hours, most sandwiches end up tasting about the same: fine, but a bit like sweat and the inside of a plastic baggie. “Today, I put a slice of lunch meat turkey and a Kraft single on the butt ends of a stale loaf.” The stranger nodded politely, though it had occurred to the old fisherman halfway through his explanation that the stranger likely had neither knowledge of nor interest in food of any kind.

​

“The pier closed a decade or so ago. Ever since, I’ve brought a crowbar to break the padlock on the gate. Every time that I came back here, someone had replaced the broken padlock from the week before.” The old fisherman shook his head. “Padlocks aren’t too cheap, and for ten years someone’d been burning through them at the rate of one a week, and for what? I could break the lock without any issue, and all the kids who used to mark this place up with graffiti, before they all grew up, would just climb the fence when they wanted in.

​

“Today, though, the gate was unlocked. The broken lock was still sitting on the ground, just where I’d left it last week. Whoever’d been locking the gate all this time, I think this week they realized they’d only ever kept doing it because they’d been doing it. They must’ve finally realized that was no way to live.” He sighed quietly and said, “Whoever it was that’d been doing it all this time, I hope they don’t hate me.”

​

“And you,” asked the stranger, “why do you keep doing this?” The pier let out a weary, creaking moan beneath their feet.
 

“You wouldn’t get it,” the old fisherman said, squinting against the sun’s gleam reflected on the water. Five years ago, when a whale skull had washed up on the beach under the pier, it garnered more attention than the oil in the shoreline sands ever had, even luring the local news cameras to the shoreline. It was unexpected, extraordinary, and a dreadful spectacle. Days prior, when strands of rotting blubber and gristle rode atop the waves and tangled on the pier’s supports, the old fisherman had been the only one to notice. He had been the only one to see how all manner of life swarmed to feed on the fetid remains of the whale, and even as the fish paid his hook and line no mind, he could find no frustration in the fruitless day. Even in a moment of life’s absence, of a whale no longer breaching the water’s surface, the old fisherman had been witness to life at its purest, while the cameras and the crowds would fawn over nothing more than its distant memory, a skull picked clean.

​

“You’re right,” said the stranger, “I don’t get it. That is why I ask.”

​

“I… ” The old fisherman closed his eyes and took a deep, slow breath. “My dad brought me here for the first time when I was young. Back then, there were these plastic chairs mounted to the pier.” He tapped his foot against the boards, where four boltholes in a square had once held a seat in place. “They got so hot, it was terrible. I sat in a bright blue one, right here. He was in a yellow one, where you are now.” The stranger nodded, glancing down at the four holes beneath his own folding chair, but did not speak. 

​

“He taught me how to fish,” the old fisherman continued, “and I loved it. We’d come out here all the time. It was a perfect life.” He sighed, shook his head, cleared his throat, and said, “When he died, I told myself I’d move on. There was a whole world out there, past the morning sea fog, and I hadn’t seen it. All I’d seen was the water off the end of this pier.” He went quiet, then looked to the stranger and murmured, “The fog’s burning off. I’ll be heading out soon.” The stranger began to look back towards the old fisherman and he averted his gaze, quickly turning his head to stare out at the horizon. 

​

“What happened?” asked the stranger. “When you tried to find a life out in the world?”

​

“Oh, I hated it. Every day was a competition—win or lose, live or die. Win and get to the next day, and it was just another competition. You couldn’t just live in the present, you had to keep one foot in the future. It felt pointless. It wasn’t right for me.” The old fisherman stopped and listened to the waves lapping at the struts of the pier. “Here, it’s simpler.” Unable to see stare past the surface of the water in any way that mattered, all the old fisherman had ever needed to do was wait for the pull at the end of his line. His trips to the pier were unambiguous weekly reminders that he had no control over the future, and hardly any over the present. He had no reason to struggle, or to work at all, as he waited for the fish to bite, for the tug at the end of his line would never come from him—it was a question of whether the fish chose to bite, nothing more. On the pier, the passage of time was not a matter of victory or defeat, life or death. There was no need to prepare for the future, only to wait for it. The future, the fish that decided to bite or ignore his baited hook, was beyond his control. So long as his line was cast into the water over the end of the pier, the old fisherman and the sea were bound together in an endless present. Past and future existed elsewhere, past the fog. A few months ago, the old fisherman had needed to dig through an old box in his attic to find a framed photograph of his father, for he was struggling to remember his face. Nobody would ever search an attic for a photograph of the old fisherman, and there were no such photographs regardless. He knew this, and had long since accepted it. The old fisherman did not know quite how to express these thoughts within him—of time and the sea and photographs in an attic—nor did he feel much of a desire to. “The water’s always going to be here,” he said simply. “So’ll the fish. There’s no rush.” When the old fisherman was young and sat side by side with his father, their twin lines piercing the water’s surface, that had once been present. In the same waters, of the end of the same pier, it might as well have still been. “Until I can’t, I’ll be here too.”

​

“I think that I understand,” said the stranger, looking off towards the horizon as well. “Perhaps not why you hate the world beyond, but certainly why you love this pier.” The old fisherman looked to him, curious.

​

“I am not like you,” continued the stranger. “If anything, I am closer to the sea, an eternity in possession of countless lives ever-changing, lives which will not change me by simply existing. Unless I seek them out, I will not notice someone like you, a lone fisherman at the end of a lonely old pier. To me, you are so brief, so fleeting. The impression you make upon the water is minuscule, the breadth of a fishing line, something the seas will never feel, and would never feel the absence of. And yet, what a story you have to tell.”

​

Something tugged at the end of the old fisherman’s line. He did not reel it in. 

​

“I think the time is coming,” said the old fisherman, looking to the boards of the pier at his feet. The stranger looked to him but said nothing. “Not today, but soon. Whatever story my life’s been, it’s near its end.” The words of the stranger sat rotten in the old fisherman’s gut once again, like alcohol on an empty stomach. The old fisherman knew how pitifully meagre the story of his life had been, and at last he understood why the stranger had come to him.

​

Wordlessly, the stranger reached over and placed a clawed hand on the old fisherman’s shoulder. The old fisherman saw the pier as it once was, felt how his young legs dangled clear of the ground from atop the blue plastic seat. Heard the voice of his father, the fighter, the fisherman before him, in his ear. “You’re doing great, kiddo! Don’t let it get away!” He had missed that voice so dearly.

​

The old fisherman reeled in his catch. The stranger removed the clawed hand from his shoulder. The old fisherman watched the fish, a flash of silver, a small and desperate life that the ocean had forgotten about the moment he pulled it from the waves, as it bled and danced on the end of his line. He wiped a tear away from his face, pulled his hook from the fish, and tossed the lonely creature over the end of the pier, back into the sea. The stranger withdrew his line from the water and stood from his seat.

​

“Same time next week?” the stranger asked, folding up his chair. The old fisherman looked up at him, for the first time all morning not averting his eyes from the kindly face of death as it stood patiently before him, and was silent for a long time.

​

“I’ll be there,” he said at last.