Jewfish

Nathan Pray pulled the Tacoma gingerly onto the street. A too-small truck for a too-small boat, but he could get away with it. There were no gradients in south Florida, its humble topography such as it was fairly leveled within Nathan’s lifetime, iced with concrete and asphalt frosting. The trailer in tow groaned and bucked, the only noise about shattering the blissful quiet, his little burg–loud and congested with its sudden human commerce–returned to him at night for a few magical hours. Scarcely a soul about.

He lowered the window, jutted an insouciant elbow into the surprising cold. My town, Nathan mused, then checked himself. My town. A quaint, obsolete notion. Who cared about hometowns anymore?

He rolled the window back up. What a winter. The snook had disappeared from his immediate sphere. Purged. A few more degrees south, one more cold snap, and the few survivors at this northern fringe of their range would perish, too. The last cold front pretty much did in the Florida linesiders. Water temps plunging from 75 degrees to 54 degrees overnight. Too abrupt a shift. The extreme low of their tolerance, in any case. Cold snap aside, there wasn’t much to keep the snook along his particular stretch of coastline. Bridges, docks, and spillways they still favored. The inlet, too, offered the current, depth, and salinity that fired their gametes during spawn. But their prized sulfurous mangroves inshore were barely holding on, leaning over the intracoastal in isolated patches as if in preparation for...