Everything I Found on the Beach by Cynan Jones

reflected back off his hands. It was a big heavy fish and the scales were bigger than thumbnails and he knew that the meat would be very good. They were difficult to sell because of the flavor of soil and the disturbing muddiness of flesh that mullet had when you caught them in estuaries or harbors, where they filtered sewage and pastes for food. But when you caught them on the rocks like this the flesh was firm and white and strong and froze well enough.
    He went on to the bass. There was a ferocity to it even lying there, some angular, predatory quality. Blood rimed the gills and the torn fins where it had refused to stop fighting the net, recusant of the fact that once it had turned into it, it was caught and there was no fight it could make. There seemed still fury in its eye that wouldnot forgive itself, as if it scoured itself for some signal it had missed that would have shown the net was there. Yet, there has to be decision. A way must be taken. He thought for a moment that the fish might still be alive. He kept coming back to that eye, so different it was from the droll, herbivorous eye of the mullet. Hunter or gatherer, both had turned themselves into the net. The mullet had looked more at peace with itself though, as if it believed though saddened and ended that it had made the choice in the best of faiths. As he undid the bass from some last traps of nylon, Hold knew that these thoughts were a ridiculous romanticism, and that there could be no peace in dying in this way. He had killed them, that was his responsibility.
    There was a scrape of stones beyond his sight and he looked up to the cliffs and saw nothing, simply the impassivity responding. Again the sound came and the loose shale flashed in his headlight and he looked up the scree to see a rabbit bump away to some safer bank. Then he saw it, as he turned his head back out to sea. Something on the water. He ripped off the headlamp and hid its light against him and crouched and had no idea why this was his reaction. He turned the light off, holding the net as if it was some safe thing.
    As his eyes altered to the dark, the small landscape grew back round him, coming in patches as his eyes focused. The humps of wrack. The pools. The grated sand. Dawn had brought a preminiscent light to the horizonwhich hid the scallop lights and which somehow made the sea look darker. There was light from the moon, some thin aureole, misting into the shifted clouds. He heard the rubber hit the rock, the strange, stretching sound like a creaking floor and he felt himself fizz with electricity. It could be someone come to poach the nets. He thought often about things coming to that, about that challenge coming like a violent dog. Don’t back down. And he turned on the light and stood up.
    His face was set. He was ready to respond, or to call out, and he put all the look he could into his shoulders and his arms, and the pump of the breaker came loudly and he set his feet and then the sound again came, an unmistakable impact, over the rising beat of his heart. He thought of the gun back on the stones above the pools.
    The inflatable was spinning slowly by the rocks. The army gray of it full and neutral at the edge of the lamp beam. It looked unmanned, but it was in the end of the beam, as if it consumed the light. Like something circling the edge of a clearing. He saw a flash of engine, some red perhaps as the boat swung. And then a heap. A dark mass in the belly of the boat and he knew immediately it was a man.
    He could feel the adrenaline surge through him and his mind turned to one repeated curse word but there was something in that very clear. He put on the headlamp and went out, footing over the rocks to the easier sand and then he went into the sea, stumbling under thepower of the breakers for safe space for his feet. There was real strength in the water and the waves were high and big and it took a few seconds for the cold water to get through his clothes and the